


Lend Me Your Heart (And I’ll Just Let You Fall)

by fiorediloto



Series: The Earth Below My Feet [2]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Infidelity, M/M, Missing Scene, Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-04-23 02:18:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19141585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorediloto/pseuds/fiorediloto
Summary: And Nix knew, he knew that this wasn’t about him, that others had seen Dick like this and anyway, even shackled to a pillory in the middle of the town square Dick’s dignity wouldn’t waver for a second. Still Nix was allowed to see Dick in this position, and for all his adventurous past he couldn’t make heads nor tails of it--the pure, clean lack of shame of it all.





	Lend Me Your Heart (And I’ll Just Let You Fall)

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [The Earth Below My Feet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18449693). This fic is based heavily on Dick Winter's _Beyond Band of Brothers_ and Larry Alexander's _Biggest Brother_ (with some help from Stephen Ambrose's _Band of Brothers_ ). The books are treated as fictional works complementary to the series, and none of this is about the real-life veterans or the people close to them.
> 
> Again and again and again thanks to my beta-reader [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/pseuds/Impala_Chick) for her excellent work, keen eye, and general awesomeness.
> 
> \---  
> Title from Mumford and Sons' _Awake My Soul_ , because their pretentious, over-articulate song lyrics make the perfect angsty titles, and because I like a theme.  
> Opening quote from Simon & Garfunkel's _America_.  
> \---

_“Kathy, I’m lost,” I said, though I knew she was sleeping_ _  
_ _“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why”_

 

**_D-Day minus 5_ **

 

It wasn’t even zero-eight-hundred, and Lewis Nixon’s mood was already shit.

It all had started at dawn, upon finding that the wake-up call hadn’t been sounded yet but he was already awake. Hester was still asleep on his cot and outside their tent all was nice and quiet. Nix had been struck by the funny thought that he might just be the only awake man on base, which had brought the secondary thought that of course he wasn’t, not by a long mile, and then the tertiary one that not a minute into consciousness he was already thinking about Dick Winters. The realization had given his day an annoying spin.

He could feel the mood brew and drip into his brain, relentless like a faulty faucet. He considered medicating it with a drop of whiskey in his coffee, quick enough for Dick not to see it—and why did it matter what Dick did or did not see?—but he hesitated a second too long, and Dick came over to sit across him at the breakfast table. 

“Morning,” he said.

Nix mumbled a noncommittal greeting from behind his cup. The warm coffee vapors helped a little, even without the alcoholic boost, but the drink tasted as crappy as usual. 

Across the table Dick started cutting his sausages methodically, with unusual care. Normally he was a fast eater, which Nix had been taught was the sign of an unrefined palate, though really it was the only sensible way to eat Army chow. But today Dick looked slowed down and detached; not absent-minded, but unavailable. Unavailable to Nix, at any rate.

“I’m going to London later,” Dick announced, twirling his coffee which he’d spiced with enough sweetener to cover the burnt edge and then some. “If you need something.”

“What’re you going to London for?”

Dick looked up, face composed in a carefully neutral expression. “I’m going to visit Wally.”

“Ah,” Nix said, and then added, “Of course.” He immediately regretted  saying that, though he hadn’t meant anything more by it than a simple, empty endorsement. “How is he? Do you know?” he added quickly.

“I’m not sure,” Dick answered. “Don called yesterday. Said he’d woken up, so that’s good news at least.”

“Awake is good,” Nix nodded, thinking of the time his college buddy Bobby Carlson had driven his car into a tree after downing a whole crate of cooking wine on a dare. The rest of them had sat in the New York house for six hours, smoking their lungs raw and not talking to each other, awaiting news from the hospital.

He took a sip from his mug, letting the warmth linger on his tongue before swallowing. He’d woken up in the end, Bobby had, but he hadn’t been the same. They rarely were, after. “Who’s Don?”

“Don Rothwell?”

“Ah, yeah. Train guy.” He had a vague recollection of blue eyes and puppy-like excitement. He hadn’t been paying too much attention, but he remembered liking him well enough. “Poor sod must be a wreck.”

Dick got a curious look over his face, like Nix had said something not funny, but somewhat unexpected. “Why do you say that?”

“Wasn’t it his idea? The pathfinder thing?”

“It could’ve happened anywhere. We’ve got a storage room full of dynamite here.”

“Sure,” Nix conceded pointedly, feeling riled by Dick’s tone. “But it didn’t. And he wouldn’t have been there if—”

“Wally’s his own man,” Dick said curtly. “He was where he wanted to be.”

Nix couldn’t say why this conversation mattered enough to either of them to turn it into an argument. It certainly didn’t matter to him, and yet the tension was there, and Dick’s deadpan expression only made it worse.

_Don’t give me that, goddamnit. Anything but that._

“All I’m saying is, if I was his friend I’d feel guilty as fuck right now.”

Dick didn’t reply to this. He chased a little piece of sausage around the plate, and when it proved too elusive for the blunt tines of his fork, he did something Nix had never seen him do. He put down his cutlery next to his half eaten breakfast, downed his coffee and stood up, hands already grabbing the tray.

“I’ll be on my way.”

Nix couldn’t stop his eyes from lingering on the leftovers, and when Dick followed his glance he seemed to get even more incensed. He blushed, a little fiery flame burning inside his cheeks.

“Hey, come on,” Nix said quickly, already feeling less confrontational, more inclined to peace. “We were talking.” And then he added something which was entirely selfish and wrong of him, but also the most heartfelt thing he’d said so far: “I barely ever see you these days.”

Dick wavered. Oh, Nix knew how to move him. Not every time, and certainly not when Dick set himself a goal and became blind and deaf to interference. But most days, on normal days, Nix knew exactly what to say to make Dick lean towards him. He wouldn’t plan it, he wouldn’t rehearse the words in his mind or anything like that. He refused the notion that he might be _manipulating_ him. Dick had a hound’s nose for insincerity; he wouldn’t stand up for that. But Nix felt the right thing to say in the same way that his body would know by instinct how to adjust to a changing wind while sailing.

“I need to go,” Dick said, more calmly now, and was Nix imagining a hint of regret in his voice? “I’m hitching a ride with a truck from the 501st. Supply run,” he added, and the conversational bit of information told Nix that he too wanted to forget their little squabble.

“Okay. You tell him I said hi, all right?”

“I will,” Dick agreed, and then didn’t say anything, which said a lot. 

“I’m stuck with briefings up at battalion all day,” Nix offered. It felt unfair to have to explain himself even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, but such was life with Dick Winters. He could tell when you’d done something wrong, whether or not you accepted the fact that you had.

“I know,” Dick nodded. “Well, I’ll see you.”

It was only after he was left alone to mull it over that Nix realized they’d been having two different conversations. He hadn’t meant anything more than what he’d said, but to Dick it must have sounded like Nix was hinting at another pair of paratroopers, another crazy idea, another crazy choice. And what if Nix ended up on a hospital bed missing a limb or maybe all of them? What if he didn’t make it back?

_If I was his friend I’d feel guilty as fuck right now._

He shook his head. It was going to be one of those days.

  
  


**_September 1943, Atlantic Ocean_ **

 

On Dick’s bunk on the SS Samaria, Nix felt positively glowing.

He had drunk a little, just enough to get the buzz started, to feel his skin tingle and his thoughts mix happily in his head. He’d brushed his teeth afterwards, because Dick wouldn’t say anything but Nix knew it bothered him—and besides, he didn’t like it that Dick could tell exactly what had passed through his mouth. He liked to believe that he could still be unpredictable, if he wanted. Following that, he’d fixed his tie, combed his hair, straightened out invisible creases off his shirt, and knocked on Dick’s door oddly feeling like he was missing a flower bouquet.

Dick was alone, he knew for sure, because he’d tricked Welsh into trading bunks. It had been easy as pie. Harry liked a stiff drink or six every now and then, and the long navigation nights were boring as fuck without medication, and Nix had sworn to him that there was nothing on God’s green earth that Dick Winters hated more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an intoxicated buddy fumbling in the dark and knocking things over while trying to take off his shoes. It generated the kind of silent, curdling fury that would make said buddy regret he’d ever considered taking up paratrooping in general, and assistant platoon leading in particular. Now Nix’s bunk buddy, on the other hand, was an unrepentant gambler who oftentimes couldn’t be seen in bed until well into the small hours...

By the time he was done with him, Harry had begged him to trade places, a magic trick Nix couldn’t have pulled off if Harry had known Dick a little better. But even though they liked each other well enough, they were still working out how the other’s mind worked, and if there was enough material for a friendship. Nix suspected that Dick kept Harry at arm’s length because of the drinking, trying to figure out if he was a good leader or if he’d crack under pressure. It could be tough, being assessed by Dick Winters. Nix remembered. 

Now face to face in the cramped bottom bunk, Dick’s hands travelled up to Nix’s hair and tucked the marginally too long strands behind his ears, no doubt pondering regulation haircuts and other such matters, while Nix felt his body turn aglow like a light bulb.

“You’ve shaved,” Dick said, looking a little surprised, a little pleased.

“Every evening for the ladies,” Nix smiled, fully aware that he could only afford a joke like that when Dick was feeling as soft and indulgent as he looked now.

Dick smiled. He was in bed when Nix had knocked, engrossed in some serious read or other and already stripped down to his underwear. The room was hot and stuffy, the tiny porthole insufficient in the summer heat; it smelled like old carpeting and the ocean.

“Hi,” Nix had said, and Dick had smiled just like he was doing now, like he knew something about Nix that nobody else did.

He’d stepped aside to let him in, only to be driven firmly against the bunk bed structure. Nix had rested both arms on the top bunk, on either side of Dick’s face, hands clasped loosely behind the other’s head.

There was something extremely gratifying about having Dick Winters pinned, pressed, or pushed against a surface. Not that the guy was hard to grab ahold of, but he was damn strong, and Nix liked the thought of that much energy somehow contained, under his control. He knew it was a fantasy—Dick could break his spine if he tried—but that didn’t detract from Nix's enjoyment.

“This room is hot as hell,” Nix said, and Dick nodded inside the cage of Nix’s arms, not quite touching him. Nix wanted to kiss him then. He found himself wanting to kiss Dick with an alarming frequency these days; and not your customary, heat-of-the-moment kissing either, the kind where one might find oneself when their blood ran hot and a welcoming mouth was there—and what were they supposed to do all the while, just stare at each other? No, this was something else, and giving in to the urge made him feel both fulfilled and anxious.

Better get things started, then.

“It won’t get much cooler than this,” Dick warned him, still waiting for Nix to make the first move, to steer this thing whichever way he wanted.

“Then let’s take a few layers off,” Nix said, tugging at Dick’s shirt.

Now they lay naked on their sides, stroking each other lazily, almost sleepily, urge subdued by the heat. Stretched parallel to the wall, Dick’s long body barely fit in the bunk. It made for a nice sight; Nix had always liked pale and freckled skin. Seeing him like this, with the luxury of full nudity, he was reminded of New York, and maybe his expression changed subtly, because Dick’s heavy-lidded eyes focused on him more sharply.

“What is it?”

Nix propped himself up on his elbow. The changed angle of his hand prompted a small, pleased sigh on Dick’s part. “Thinking of something.”

“What?”

“Reciprocation,” Nix said.

“Now I’m sure that you’re sober,” Dick joked, though he sounded more affectionate than humorous.

Nix kissed him then, because they were overdue for a kiss, cocks in hand and all, certainly not just because he felt like it.

“What am I reciprocating?” Dick asked on his lips, already a little short of breath, and the absurd earnestness of the question triggered a painful throb inside Nix’s chest, which he shrugged off with a chuckle.

He reached around under Dick’s side, pulling him flat on his back, then climbed on top of him. Dick raised his hands in immediate surrender and Nix pinned his wrists down to the pillow, meeting him there for another kiss.

He felt nervous, like he had to prove himself, and he hadn’t felt like that in years, which is how he knew he was being ridiculous. So now he felt both nervous _and_ ridiculous. But Dick had had years to learn the ropes, while Nix was playing it by ear at best, and all he knew in his heart of hearts was that sometimes he wanted it so badly that he—fuck, he just _had_ to go for it.

“Sit up a little,” he said.

He moved down along Dick’s body and between his legs, eventually ending up on his stomach with his feet dangling off the bed, comfortable enough for the time being.

Dick was holding his breath—no, he was breathing, but he was also restraining himself, stomach carefully moving up and down.

Nix took him in his hand and again thought of New York, and immediately his cock stirred against the mattress. He rubbed against it a little.

“Lew, you don’t—” Dick started, mistaking his pause for hesitation.

“I don’t what?” Nix murmured, giving his cock a tentative lick.

Dick threaded his fingers through his own hair, leaving his arm there, elbow resting on the pillow propped up behind his back. “Owe me,” he finished.

Nix didn’t bother answering. He took Dick’s cock in his mouth, just the head first, then more, and was immediately rewarded for his endeavors with a sharp sigh. It tasted like skin and salt, tangier when he licked the first dense drops off the tip and let them roll to the back of his mouth. He pulled back, swallowing. Dick was regarding him with that expression he had sometimes, like Nix was a wild animal ready to dart away if Dick made a sudden movement.

“This good?” Nix asked, bending down to apply his mouth to the length again, licking it carefully with his whole tongue, then taking it in as far as it would go.

“Oh yeah,” Dick breathed, voice trembling with pleasure and a hint of laughter. “Yeah. It’s—very good.”

Nix let himself fall into a steady rhythm, studying Dick’s reaction as he went, stealing upward glances every now and then and invariably meeting Dick’s eyes looking down at his face. He sucked the head of Dick’s cock loudly. 

“For the love of— _Lew_ ,” Dick gasped, catching himself before the profanity left his lips, though the accidental substitution turned out even more sacrilegious.

Nix felt Dick’s fingertips brush his ear, his jaw, his neck. They stopped on his shoulder, groping the muscle, thumb digging into the dimple of his clavicle. When Nix rubbed his tongue roughly against the underside of his cock, Dick’s fingers dug into his flesh until it hurt.

He wasn’t too far, Dick wasn’t, and as ever the thought of making him lose control sent blood rushing down to Nix’s groin. He looked up, licking his lips, enjoying the way Dick’s eyes fixed on his mouth as he did so.

“Want to come in my mouth?” he asked softly. He’d aimed at cocky, but it came out sounding warm instead.

For a moment Dick looked like he had considered a different answer, given it a run in his head and failed to say it.

“Yes,” he whispered.

Nix bent his head down. He felt Dick’s gaze on himself for a while, but eventually Dick’s body slumped back against the pillow, stretched in one long, tense line from his bared throat to Nix’s mouth, fingers digging holes in the bedsheets.

He came with a groan, filling the back of Nix’s mouth with a few surprisingly forceful shots of the same tangy taste he’d drawn off the tip earlier. Nix swallowed down a couple times, and then once more because of the funny, slimy feeling it had left on the roof of his mouth. He looked up, face hot.

“Come up here,” Dick called, reaching out to touch his arm.

He pulled Nix onto his lap for a kiss, a long messy one like Dick wanted to clean Nix’s mouth of any residual taste, or at least share it, a stirring thought which reminded Nix of how painfully hard he still was.

Dick finger-combed Nix’s hair back, causing the loosened locks to fall over his face. Hands trailed down to Nix’s shoulders, along his arms, all the way to Nix’s hips, resting large and warm on the small of his back. The flush was draining from his face already, leaving behind a healthy pink color that covered all his freckles like a blanket.

Dick smiled, a little smugly, Nix thought. “I like what a few minutes of honest work does to your looks,” he declared.

“It’s a decent job for decent people.”

“I said honest. Nobody would call you decent now.”

“Thank God. I’ve got a reputation to keep up.”

Dick’s hands closed around Nix’s butt cheeks, nudging him up on his knees. “I’m afraid you’ll have to work for it a little more,” he said, sliding lower on his back, face level with Nix’s hard cock. He stroked the back of Nix’s thighs, pulling him closer.

“Fuck,” Nix whispered as Dick guided him into his mouth. With the pillow tucked behind his head and Nix straddling his chest Dick could just about lie still, while Nix had all the leeway he needed. “Fuck,” he repeated, putting up one hand against the wall.

Nix rocked forward, eyelids dropping closed for a moment at the feeling of his cock rubbing on Dick’s tongue. He checked on him before picking up the pace, making sure that he was comfortable with the angle and all, then slowly started to fuck his mouth.

His face, Christ Almighty. Nix generally had a way with words, but some things left him speechless. Like how Dick, _Dick_ , who couldn’t tolerate a smudge on his shirt, would let himself be seen like this—mouth wrapped around Nix’s cock, cheeks hollowing out in time with the rhythm, sweat glinting on his upper lip—and still hold Nix’s stare with such impregnable, unflinching dignity. And Nix knew, he knew that this wasn’t about him, that others had seen Dick like this and anyway, even shackled to a pillory in the middle of the town square Dick’s dignity wouldn’t waver for a second. Still Nix was allowed to see Dick in this position, and for all his adventurous past he couldn’t make heads nor tails of it—the pure, clean lack of shame of it all.

His eyes fell shut as he came, he couldn’t stop himself. When he opened them Dick was still there, eyelids turning heavy, mouth still full of him. Nix extracted himself carefully, rolling off to the side. His heart was thumping like crazy, and when Dick rolled over and on top of him a second, mismatched thumping pressed up against his ribcage. Dick rested his cheek on Nix’s heart and lay still, breathing unevenly. Nix’s skin felt clammy with sweat where their bodies touched, but he didn’t want Dick to move.

For a long while the only noise in the room was the buzzing of the electric light above their heads and the splashing of the waves against the hull of the ship. Once the sweat had cooled off it was surprisingly nice; it reminded him of sailing nights. Nix closed his eyes and soon dozed off.

At some point he was vaguely aware of Dick leaving the bed. He must have come back, though, because Nix awoke to a painful throb in his right arm and found Dick lying flat on top of it, shoulder pressing firmly on the inside of Nix’s elbow. He had put his undershirt and boxers back on.

Slowly, Nix started to squirm. He moved his right arm, his tingling fingers, his right leg which was trapped between Dick’s own, and when Dick still didn’t seem to notice he squeezed his shoulder, craning his neck to peek at Dick’s face.

“Mm,” Dick mumbled, eyes closed.

“Arm.”

Dick moved away then, releasing the offended limb as Nix muttered of paratroopers who were actually Panzers in disguise. Dick’s face dropped on the pillow next to Nix’s cheek, one leg still tangled with Nix’s own.

Dick took a few light breaths and then slowly opened one eye. Nix was massaging his right hand back to life. Quietly, Dick took it and brought it to his lips.

Nix went immediately stiff. Later he would tell himself that it hadn’t been his fault: he just hadn’t expected it. But Dick saw his reaction and his face fell.

“Please don’t,” he said softly.

“What?”

“Get weird about it.”

Nix swallowed. Now he felt restless, and it didn’t help that Dick could see right through him so easily, damn the man. He felt like a sip would help; a sip would be enough to quell a troubled mind. Not to mention his mouth still tasted like cum.

“I’m thirsty,” he said, getting up on his elbow.

“There’s water on the nightstand.”

“Ha. Nice try.”

He rolled over Dick’s body and onto his feet, searching his jacket for the flask, and when he found it he took a couple of eager gulps which did at least wash away the bitter aftertaste from the back of his tongue.

He turned. Dick hadn’t moved, wasn’t looking his way, yet Nix thought there was something judgemental about the set of his shoulders.

“I guess I’ll hit the lavatory and get to bed,” he announced, and when no reply came he slipped into his underclothes and went out into the corridor.

So maybe he took a few more medicinal sips along the way, and after brushing his teeth the combined taste of whiskey and toothpaste was so distasteful that he had to take a couple more just to cleanse his palate, but when he got back he was feeling much better—more centered, more in control, and definitely not like the thought of Dick kissing his fingers made him want to run to the hills.

The roof light was off and Dick lay in his bunk hugging his pillow. Funny, that. Once upon a time Nix had wrongly guessed that Dick Winters would sleep face up, arms resting along his sides like a fresh corpse, boots on like a minuteman.

He considered joining him. Dick would’ve appreciated it. And sure, it would have made for a hell of a sleepless night, all bumping elbows and knees and shoulders, but night sleep was overrated. Dick would have seen right through him like he did and he would have known the gesture for what it was: proof of how soft Nix had gotten over him. Yeah, he would’ve liked that. 

But then in the morning, Nix could already tell how it would go. They would lock eyes across the pillow and Dick would see that Nix was embarrassed. Ashamed. They would dress in silence like they had in New York and at Mackall before that, and Nix would want to make himself busy with something or other at battalion HQ and then he’d refuse to show up until late in the evening to avoid Dick and spare himself further embarrassment.

“Nix?”

He swallowed. “Yeah?”

“Stop telling Harry bullshit about me.”

Nix chuckled, a forced little laughter that quickly died out. “Yeah. Sure thing.”

“Thank you.”

There was nothing else to say. Nix climbed quietly onto his bunk and let the Vat and the rocking of the ship lull him to sleep.

  
  


**_D-Day minus 4_ **

 

They met at the thirteen-hundred briefing. Dick stood in the room long after everybody else had left, quietly studying the maps and the sand tables with a frown on his brow, pencilling down notes on his pocket map. He was still there when Easy Company poured in and Meehan took the stand.

Nix stayed through the men’s briefing, and through the Fox officers’ briefing, and again for the last round with the rest of Fox Company. By fifteen-hundred his ears were ringing with the names of French coastal towns and tactical little sentences like _single continuous beach-head_ , to the point where he could’ve repeated the words one by one in his sleep but the meaning was starting to escape him.

Afterwards he went and found Dick in his tent. He’d taken apart his rifle and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the disassembled parts, which he had neatly divided in two stacks. His bayonet already shone by the clean stack, and next to it lay the Scottish knife Nix had bought for him on furlough.

“Careful with that,” Nix joked, as Dick took the mouth of the rifle up to his eye to check it for soot.

The corner of Dick’s mouth curled up just a little. “Old joke.”

“I feel old today.”

“Thought you’d be thrilled. It’s your day.”

Nix walked slowly into the tent and sat gingerly on the edge of the rusty cot. “Dunno. I feel more like a glorified geography teacher.”

Dick made a vaguely amused sound and said nothing. To the casual observer he might have looked laser-focused on the job at hand, but Nix could read him better than any map and Dick’s shoulders were tense, his face composed in a stoic countenance that suggested heavy thoughts. Then again, most men looked like that today.

Nix poked Dick’s knee with the tip of his boot. “How is he?”

Dick took up the butt plate and poured a drop of gun oil onto his rag. He had rolled up his sleeves, and the thin red hair on his arms looked almost translucent in the light.

“He got lucky. He took a shard in the neck, almost bled to death. It’s a miracle they got him back.”

The information was delivered in a clinical, carefully neutral tone of voice.

“But he’ll make it,” Nix said, not a question, because you don’t ask a question like that.

Dick paused before answering. “Yeah. They couldn’t do much about his left hand. But he’s right-handed. So.”

“Silver lining,” Nix added, uselessly.

“You could say that.”

Dick looked like a more somber, quieter version of himself, which made Nix feel awkward. He didn’t like Wally. Perhaps he’d liked him at the beginning, but he hadn’t for a long time, and now empathy was doing that little number empathy does sometimes, the one where it turns into guilt.

“I saw Rothwell earlier,” Nix said. “We had a joint briefing in the morning.”

The guy had looked worn out but determined, and every bit ready to jump. Nix had stopped to exchange a few words, and maybe it had been something Nix had said or maybe the way he’d said it, but Don had patted his arm warmly and out of the blue he’d blurted: “It’s good, isn’t it. To have a friend.” And while Nix agreed reflexively, wondering what he was talking about, the other had spelled it out for him: “Tell Dick I said hi, will you.”

“He says hi.”

“Thanks.”

Nix tapped his foot on the floor, watching Dick clean and polish the barrel of his rifle with painstaking care. He cleared his throat.

“Dick, what I said this morning. I didn’t mean it like I think it’s his fault. Because I don’t.”

Dick nodded.

“You make your choices. We all do.”

“Yeah,” Dick agreed softly.

“And you end up where you want to be.”

Dick sighed. “Or somewhere around there.”

“Or somewhere around there.”

Nix reached out and put a hand on Dick’s shoulder. He wished there was something he could do to shake Dick out of the mood, but he had no clue where to start.

“It’s good to have a friend around here,” he said, squeezing Dick’s shoulder.

Dick smiled faintly, finally looking up—at Nix’s hand first, then at his face. “That was always the plan.”

Nix’s hand turned onto its side, and his knuckles brushed Dick’s throat in a gesture that could not be mistaken for anything but what it was. His index finger wormed a little higher, grazing Dick’s jaw. He must’ve gone mad, the flap was wide open. But he was tired, and Dick was in pain, and the last time they’d been close it had been so...

Dick bent forward to collect the scattered rifle parts, and Nix was left groping the air.

“This will take a while. I’ll see you in the mess, all right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Nix said, rubbing his hands on his thighs. He got up on his feet. “I’ll go check on Harry, see if he’s done writing poems to what’s-her-name.”

“Remind him he needs to study the maps.”

“Nah. You can be the stern father later.”

There it was, the corner of Dick’s mouth, curling up a tiny fraction. Nix called it a victory and left feeling at least a little reassured.

  
  


**_February 1944, United Kingdom_ **

 

In February, Nix managed to convince Dick that the Airborne wouldn’t crumble to dust if after six months of non-stop field training, jump rehearsals and joint military exercises, one first lieutenant took a few days off. It took him almost two weeks of relentless drilling, but he was pleased to the point of smug when he saw the countersigned furlough on Strayer’s outgoing mail rack.

That evening, when he stopped at the Barneses’ on his way to the Blue Boar, Mrs. Barnes welcomed him warmly as she always did. In the dining room Nix found Harry and Dick and Mr. Barnes at the table with tea and cards spread out in what looked suspiciously like a game of rummy.

“Lieutenant Nixon, would you like to play?” Mrs. Barnes asked, pointing at the fourth chair. Her card hand sat face-down on the table next to her cup.

“Darling, the Lieutenant can’t join in the middle of the game,” Mr. Barnes pointed out, eyes focused on his cards like they might change if he stopped looking. He didn’t like Nix much, which was no surprise, since Nix didn’t like the pious little man either.

“Oh, he can have my place. I’m no good at cards,” Mrs. Barnes explained to Nix, waving a hand dismissively at her husband. “Sit down,” she insisted, gently steering Nix towards the table. “Why don’t I fetch you a cup, Lieutenant?”

“You’re very kind, ma’am, but I’m just passing by. Lieutenant Winters forgot to pick up his mail,” he explained, pulling an envelope out of his inner pocket.

Dick looked up. “Did I?”

“You did,” Nix confirmed. He nodded in the direction of the door. “Looks urgent too.”

Dick frowned and stood up. He took the letter from Nix’s hand and headed out into the porch. Before saying his goodbyes Nix threw a glance down at Harry, who looked a little desperate for an excuse to leave the table as well, but Nix graced him with a tiny smirk that meant, “Not this time, buddy,” and followed Dick outside.

“I thought it was from home,” Dick said with obvious relief, turning the white, unsealed envelope in his hands. He opened it.

“Sorry about that,” Nix replied as Dick’s eyes quickly scanned the letter. “Well. Congratulations on your furlough.”

Dick looked up, not understanding entirely, though the corner of his mouth was already turning upwards. “There’s your name on this pass.”

Nix leaned against the wall, acting casual. “We both know what happens when you travel alone. You’re a beacon for pickpockets. And that mortgage ain’t gonna pay itself, am I right?”

It was a proper smile now, premium Winters variety. Nix felt unreasonably pleased with himself, and had to look away and search his pockets for a cigarette lest he ended up grinning and staring like a fool.

“Who said I’m going to travel?” Dick teased him. “Maybe I’ll stay put and catch up on some reading.”

“Like hell you will,” Nix snorted.

Dick stepped closer to Nix and to the wall, crossing his arms on his chest as if to brace himself against the cold. Nix had a sudden urge to wrap his arms around Dick and pull their bodies flush together, but he had to settle for bending his neck just a fraction of an inch closer and being happy with that.

“Well, then,” Dick said, looking like he was in no hurry to go back. “Where are we going?”

Nix had finally found a flattened out cigarette pack in his breast pocket. He took one, offering out of habit, though he knew Dick would refuse.

“Paris would have been my first pick,” he explained around the cigarette, cupping his hand to protect the flame of the lighter from the wind, “but I’m told French hospitality has dropped somewhat in the past few years.”

“Quite,” Dick agreed.

“Why don’t I give you a hint,” Nix smiled. “There’s something in it for both of us.”

“And it’s not in occupied territory?”

“Smart boy,” Nix pointed at Dick with the hand that held the cigarette.

Dick considered for a moment. “You haven’t given me a lot to go by.”

“Giving up already?”

Dick shrugged.

“Scotland, my friend. Land of fine whiskeys and men in skirts,” Nix declared with a grin. He inspected his cigarette, then looked up to check on Dick’s reaction. The other man was still smiling. “You can look at them. I don’t mind,” Nix added, maybe pushing his luck a bit.

Dick looked unflappable. “I will,” he said simply, and held Nix’s gaze with such a  serene, superior amount of confidence that Nix was forced to lower his eyes first. “Though I wouldn’t know,” Dick continued, voice now soft and gentle like a purr. “There’s a world of good to be said about trousers.”

Nix must have just imagined the other’s eyes flickering to Nix’s crotch and back, but a rush of blood warmed up his cheeks all the same; he felt it all the more strongly against the chilly draft grazing his face.

“Yeah, all right, I get the picture,” he mumbled. He snatched his pass from Dick’s hand and waved it in the direction of the door. “Go back inside before you freeze your ass off. And tell Harry I’ll be at the pub, okay?”

“He won’t be too long,” Dick supplied. “Mrs. Barnes is fleecing us.”

Nix grinned. “Good girl.”

A few days later, as their train left London’s suburbs and the English countryside started rolling outside the window, Nix was acutely reminded of the regiment’s train ride to Camp Shanks.

Trains are trains, and in itself that ride hadn’t been particularly memorable: they had sat and chatted, Dick had written two full letters home, Harry had napped on and off through most of it, and Nix had looked out of the window for a long time and found himself counting the stops, mapping the shrinking distance from Nixon, from home.

Nothing memorable, really, except this thing with Dick had been so much newer then, and so tender, like a fresh scab that hurt if you pressed too hard. Nix remembered the trip as one strenuous attempt to keep things light, torn between fear of the looming awkwardness and frustration at how effortlessly they had managed it before. How light-footed and sure they’d treaded around each other when they were just buddies, like old dance partners, until suddenly all the steps they knew were no good anymore. 

Now Dick’s eyes met Nix’s in the window and held Nix’s gaze for a while, but he didn’t say anything. He looked a little quiet, but relaxed. He propped up an elbow on the windowsill, rested his chin on his hand and resumed looking outside.

It wasn’t that much better now, Nix thought, but they had managed to pick up some new steps along the way.

“What did you tell Harry?” Nix asked, to make a conversation.

“Nothing much. He didn’t ask.”

“Didn’t he?”

There was a dense pause. Dick raised his head. “What did _you_ tell him?”

“I had an elaborate story about helping you lose your virginity,” Nix started, secretly enjoying the way Dick’s face set itself into a frown, “but in the end I settled for the truth.” The frown deepened, and Nix thought it best not to push his luck on this one. “That you don’t know how to have fun, and you deserve to have fun at least once in your life,” he explained.

At this, a thin smile surfaced on Dick’s face. “Well, that’s true enough,” he admitted, resuming his position at the window. Nix searched for the other’s eyes in the reflection, but Dick was not looking.

“Hey, cheer up,” Nix said, nudging his foot. “You’re on vacation.”

Dick hummed a noncommittal sound. “It feels weird," he said, ’cause leave it to Dick to make vacation sound like a chore.

“It feels good,” Nix corrected him. “Can’t remember the last time you had a day off. Hell, I can’t remember the last time _I_ had a day off.”

“Christmas Day,” Dick supplied, easily.

“Oh yeah,” Nix scoffed. “ _One_ day out of the kindness of Sink’s heart.”

Nix wasn't fond of Christmas. He might have loved it at some point, when he was very young, but he had since then lived through many holiday seasons in the Nixon household, which involved shouting and recriminating and Father collapsing drunk in his armchair and Mother retreating to her room and the kids unwrapping their gifts alone. Once Nix had been old enough to drink—that is, not very old at all—he'd found ways to numb the discomfort, but the side effect was that now Christmas carols made him feel thirsty for alcohol and nauseous at the same time.

But Christmas ‘43 had been good, for all his bitching about it. There had been eggnog and Christmas pudding and a sad but well-meaning little spruce, and before the day was over he had managed to corner Dick for a private celebration of sorts. Of course he’d been brutally drunk by then, because it was Christmas all the same, but he liked to think that the encounter had not been entirely devoid of grace.

“What would you have done with more days?” Dick asked. It was a genuine question; the man didn't lend himself to pointless rhetoricals. He rested his back against the seat, studying Nix with a degree of interest. “Being on the other side of the ocean and all.”

Nix paused, taken aback. He had never really considered it. He did so now.

“There would’ve been plenty to do,” he said. “We could have—for one, drunk ourselves stupid,” he offered.

“I faintly remember you doing that.”

“Or gone out with some pretty ladies and done all sorts of stupid things,” Nix continued.

“You’re kinda losing me here,” Dick warned him, his naturally low tone of voice dropping even lower.

Nix leaned forward, elbows on knees, his hands so close to Dick’s legs that extending a finger would’ve been enough to touch him.

"What about roaming Wiltshire on a borrowed Army jeep and shocking the locals?"

Dick held his gaze and Nix could tell with certainty that they were feeling the same thing right now, the same warmth building up inside. He threw a glance at the end of the crowded car, where the restroom door was, and then forced himself to sit back and smile as if he’d thought nothing at all.

“Shocking them how?” Dick prodded him, and Nix wished that they shared a language nobody around them understood—French a safe enough bet—so that he could tell Dick exactly how.

“I’m guessing eating Hershey bars in public would have done the trick,” he said instead, and cashed in his reward in the sound of Dick’s soft chuckle.

A huge storm had been looming just past the border of Scotland, and once they crossed it in the evening, the sky broke and it hit the train in full force. The thick rain reminded them of their miserable training in the South, of full-gear jumps in barely safe weather conditions and endless trudging on muddy grounds. Some forty to fifty minutes ahead of Edinburgh the train slowed down, tentatively picked up speed, slowed down again and finally stopped. A tree had fallen on the tracks, a conductor explained.

It was well past twenty-one-hundred before they got to move again. By then Dick had stopped spying outside into the fluttering darkness for clues of progress and had closed his eyes, hands loosely interlaced in his lap. The train resumed moving with a jerk and Dick was startled awake. His gaze fell naturally on Nix, took him in, and an involuntary twitch that could’ve been a smile graced his mouth for a second. He bent his head to the side and let his eyes fall closed again for the rest of the trip.

At the hotel, close to midnight, Nix took care of the practicalities: one room, two beds, _private bathroom, please_ , and collected the key while Dick headed upstairs with a heavy gait.

Already from the looks of the hall it had been apparent that it was a simple, clean, no-nonsense establishment, and the room was spartan in the same vein. Dick looked around himself with an air of quiet approval which pleased Nix. It had been a recommendation from a Scottish RAF Flying Officer he had had a few drinks with, though the guy had insisted that the place was a little too strict on the ‘no visitors’ policy and had suggested it only as an afterthought.

“There’s no way I’m not covering half of the bill,” Dick announced as the door locked behind them.

Nix ignored him, since of course that was not going to happen. He would have to think of a way for it not to happen and Dick to somehow be okay with it, but that was another day’s problem.

“I’ll have a bath,” he said, throwing a quick peek inside the bathroom.

“Go ahead. I’m done for the day,” Dick replied, stifling a yawn.

Dick claimed the bed closer to the window and started undressing. He looked tired, though they hadn’t done more than sitting all day. Dick was by no means a nocturnal person, and Nix knew from a full year of sharing quarters that whatever happened, wherever they were, Nix would find him completely awake at zero-five-hundred sharp the next morning. Vice versa, Nix dragged himself through mornings like a sleepwalker but was now perfectly alert; even a little _too_ alert.

He looked around, not moving. He felt subtly uncomfortable, like something was crawling under his skin and threatening to burst. All those miles and his nagging and his planning and here they were, entirely alone: not by accident, not because the Army had ordered so, but by Nix’s own design—and suddenly it felt like a mistake.

At some point Dick realized that Nix was just standing silent by his bed as if stunned, and turned around to throw him a quick assessing glance. Dick’s shirt and jacket were folded away, shoes and trousers still on with the belt hanging loose from the loops.

“Hey,” Dick said, taking on the soft, sympathetic expression that Nix had seen him use at times with younger troopers, to raise them up from the dejected state in which Sobel had left them. The kids had appreciated, but right now it just made him feel worse.

“Yeah,” Nix said, pretending there had been a question. He took off his jacket and threw the flask on the bed, for later. “I’ll go run the bath.”

The next morning they had a late breakfast, Dick having granted him a couple extra hours of sleep before throwing him off his bed, and on a full belly they went to visit the Castle. Dick, whose idea of an ancient building was a moldy log cabin from the colonial era, was duly impressed.

They spent some time at the War Memorial, perhaps longer than Nix would have liked. He shuffled quickly around in the shrine, mentally ticking it off as done, and was already out in the garden when he realized that Dick was still lingering inside.

He didn't feel like going back in, and it wasn't raining, so he lit himself a cigarette and walked over to the memorial plaque, which brought to mind Currahee. He wondered idly if the Scottish soldiers who served at the Castle would run the hillside up to the stone like the 506th used to do at Toccoa. The thought made him scoff internally; that gentle winding slope couldn’t hold a match to Currahee.

“There you are,” Dick said, leaning back on the ironwork railing next to him.

Nix hummed a response. The usual morning gloom had lifted, mostly thanks to a generous breakfast, but he felt a little subdued and sleepy still, like he wouldn’t mind going back to bed for a late morning nap. He kept the thought to himself; Dick would’ve laughed.

“Did your father serve?” he asked instead.

“Weak heart. Yours?”

“Yeah. He left a pinky finger and his sunny disposition in France.”

Dick was silent for a moment. “War changed a lot of men,” he said at last, not catching the sarcasm in Nix's voice or perhaps choosing to ignore it.

“From what I've heard it actually improved this one. Can you imagine?”

Dick graced him with a tiny smile, probably out of courtesy, because Dick had no clue what Nix's father was like, nor what the point was when Nix talked about him like that.

“Well,” Nix said, killing his cigarette on the railing. “I'll introduce you one day. You'll see for yourself.” He gestured in the direction of the Castle. “Shall we?”

In the afternoon they went shopping. Dick wanted to buy souvenirs for his family, which Nix thought was a joke until he realized that Dick actually meant it. Off they went to the Royal Mile then, and spent a few hours checking out knick-knack shops and jewelleries and woolen clothes stores. In a shop on High Street, Nix saw Dick fondle a stiletto knife for a while before putting it back on the shelf.

“Why not?” he asked, but Dick shook his head.

“Don’t really need it,” he said, moving on.

Even without the knife, that was the most money Nix had ever seen him spend in one go, and he couldn't resist commenting on it later, at dinner. 

Dick seemed vaguely embarrassed by the remark, which was puzzling—even more so than usual, as people's attitudes towards money were often puzzling to Nix.

“Dad wrote me last week that it's almost paid off.”

“The mortgage?”

Dick nodded. Nix realized then that Dick wasn't embarrassed at all; he was in fact overly proud and fighting to keep himself in check. Pride is a sin, after all, and there was a hint of smugness in the smile Dick was suppressing.

“Hey, that’s great,” Nix said, pushing his pint forward across the table. “That calls for a celebration.”

“It's not done yet,” Dick stopped him. “There's two more installments to be paid.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on,” Nix insisted, lifting the pint.

“When it's paid off,” Dick said.

“That a promise?”

“No. And honestly, I will never understand why you care so much.”

“I like corrupting you,” Nix replied, settling for bringing the pint up to his mouth instead of waiting for Dick. “It's a passion of mine.”

Dick reached for his water. “That what you think happened here?” he asked with a half smile.

“Well, I can’t really make that claim, can I?” Nix replied breezily. “Someone beat me to it.”

Dick looked away, though the half smile remained in place, and Nix thought that the smile wasn't for him anymore. He thought of a random college boy who might or might not have looked like a younger Wally Moore, and something fiery and acidic threatened to spill over his heart. He promptly drowned it with ale.

That night, in the room, Dick approached him as if he might try to touch him, and Nix immediately felt his palms turn sweaty. He took a step back, nodding towards the bathroom.

“I’ll pop in there for a while, grab a shower.”

Dick looked taken aback. “Sure,” he said.

Nix felt an automatic apology rise to his lips, like he had inadvertently kicked Dick in the shin, but he crushed it before it came out.

The third day it poured all morning and they hopped from place to place, seeking shelter from the rain: the old cathedral, the glasshouses of the Botanic Garden. After lunch, dismayed by what looked like a never-ending storm, they decided to hide for a few hours in a movie theater.

On a Tuesday afternoon they were about the only customers in the room, and Nix's breath caught a little when, about thirty minutes in, the back of Dick's fingers brushed his hand over the armrest. Nix lost interest in the plot (something about Gary Cooper blowing up a bridge in Spain), and gave up entirely on focusing on the film when Dick—resolutely looking forward—took his hand and squeezed it for a moment. Nix squeezed back, and Dick's fingers retreated, but for the remaining hour Nix swore that he could still feel the ghost of the touch on his skin.

By the time they were out of the theater, the sun had gone down and the blackout had dyed everything black. They stumbled through dark streets, clothes soaking fast since neither had bothered to procure an umbrella, a strangely exhilarating experience that landed them laughing and short of breath in a tiny alley that engulfed them in a thick, earthy smell, like undergrowth. Hands wandered, uncertain at first, then Dick’s head dipped forward and his mouth pressed possessively on Nix’s pulse point at his throat.

They walked off into the rain once more and made a local pub owner very unhappy with their wet boots, but they got a table by the fireplace and for the rest of the evening Nix secretly smiled at the way Dick’s hair progressively dried and fluffed up lopsidedly on his head, never thinking of mentioning it lest the other feel obliged to comb it down.

So there was no reason why Nix should feel uncomfortable, or embarrassed, or really anything but expectant, when they finally made their way back to the hotel. The fireplace was already on, the wooden blinds shut. Dick locked the door and walked over to the nightstand to switch on a lamp, and then turned around to find Nix standing where he’d left him. A nervous wreck. Nix gritted his teeth and wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

“Lew,” Dick started, in his softer voice.

Nix ignored him. He pulled off his boots and wet socks and kicked them to the side, heading barefoot to the bathroom.

He was lying down in the tub, nerves soothed with the help of the flask and a cigarette and steamy hot water, when Dick knocked on the door. He sat up a little, water sloshing around.

“Yes?”

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Dick had dropped his jacket and tie, and his shirt was open down to the second button, revealing the white collar of his undershirt. He had rolled up his sleeves and his hair pointed comically in all directions.

“I’m done,” Nix started, grabbing the slippery edge of the tub.

“It’s all right. I like a morning shower,” Dick said, and Nix’s hand dipped back under the water.

Dick closed the bathroom door and took a step forward. He sat carefully on the edge of the tub, hands in his lap. It was wet, of course, and Nix saw a darker spot grow on the backside of Dick’s trousers, but the other man didn’t seem to care.

“Want to tell me what this is about?” Dick asked—gently enough, Nix thought, but also with a steely edge to his voice.

“What is what about?” Nix replied.

Dick gestured silently at the room, at their bodies, at all there was and ever would be between them, and Nix’s stomach churned.

“What? We’re just having a jolly good time,” he shrugged.

Dick’s stare turned hard, his jaw set. When he spoke, he did so slowly and softly, but there was something ragged in the way his voice was kept low and measured.

“I swear sometimes I feel like slapping you.”

“Bold words,” Nix scoffed, looking for his cigarettes on the stool next to the tub. “Why not a good old-fashioned spanking, Lieutenant? I guess _that_ ’d teach me a lesson.” He grabbed the pack, pulling out a cigarette by the filter. He reached for the lighter next.

“I’m about ten years too late for that,” Dick spat, and Nix thought that that was the first truly hateful thing he’d heard him say in however long they’d known each other. He was a magician, Nix was, turning people into the worst versions of themselves with little more than a finger snap.

“Yeah, well,” he said around his cigarette, as he tried and failed to light it. The Zippo sparkled a few times but no flame came out. He shook it forcefully, hoping to dislodge the last drops of flammable liquid. “Not all of us can grow up— _goddamn_ it—into paragons of virtue like yourself,” he snorted, voice dripping with sarcasm.

And that, which as far as hateful goes was a solid eight out of ten, that made Dick snap. It was a frightful thing to see. He snatched Nix’s lighter and sent it flying across the room, straight towards the door which stopped its course with a loud bang. The cigarette fell in the water. Next, Dick’s hand shot up to the side of Nix’s face, fingertips digging into his skull, thumb resting heavily on Nix’s cheekbone.

Nix swallowed as his heart started racing. He expected the kiss that followed to feel like a punishment—strong and imposing and unpleasant, which would have been a first—and was prepared to accept it as well-deserved, but it was warm and deep and desperate instead, and strong and urgent too, but in a familiar way. He moaned softly into it, a vulnerable little sound he was immediately ashamed of, and Dick pulled back just to kiss him again and again and again, his whole body leaning in. Dick’s left hand reached and missed; Nix heard water splash around. The next thing he knew, that hand was up to the other side of his face, smearing water and soapy foam onto his cheek.

“You’ll be the death of me,” Dick murmured against his mouth, and his voice was thick with emotion now, tender but also veined with frustration. A part of Nix liked that, he realized. Having that kind of power.

“Get in here,” he said.

“We'll never—”

“Just get your ass in here.”

Dick pulled back and started unbuttoning his drenched shirt. Nix sat upright and looked around himself in the tub, which was already small for one, and figured that Dick was right, there was no way they could possibly fit in it together, but that didn’t stop him from reaching for Dick’s belt and undoing it, urging him on.

After a rather daring maneuver on slippery porcelain, Dick’s body finally hovered over his, more than half out of the water, but that only mattered if one’s point was to actually get washed. The tub had been too full to start with, and half of the water had spilled out onto the floor in the most glorious flood.

Nix ran a hand over Dick’s dry arm and shoulder and pulled Dick’s head down to his mouth. It was too easy, now, to fall into the familiar rhythm, to reach out and feel Dick’s hardness in his hand like all those times before. Nix sighed sharply when Dick reached down between his legs, and for a while they did nothing more than pull each other off, water turning lukewarm around their lower bodies and dripping cold from their hair. Perhaps it wasn't the most comfortable, but there was something undeniably poetic in the way Dick’s wet hair glistened under the electric light.

“You want to finish like this?” Dick murmured, kissing the water off his cheeks, his jaw. “Or…”

He left the question hanging, and Nix’s mind ran to other things, things he’d given some thought, but always tangentially, in passing, like the topic didn’t deserve too much consideration. Now he dropped his gaze and his left hand moved of its own accord along Dick’s side and his lower back and cupped a muscular buttcheek in his palm.

There was a newfound spark of interest in Dick’s eyes, and Nix felt immediately out of his depth. They hadn’t landed on solid ground yet; this blissful little high they were riding could end anytime and leave them worse than before.

Dick sat back on his heels, straddling Nix’s legs, and a hundred little drops rained down from his chest. His reddened cock peeked out of the water’s surface.

“Bed?” Nix asked in lieu of whatever felt too dangerous to ask. He licked his lips. They tasted bitter, like soap.

On the somewhat narrow bed they worked out the logistics of sucking each other off at the same time. After a doomed attempt with Nix on top, they found that it wasn’t quite as strenuous if they both lied on their sides; curled into each other like that it was actually the most intimate thing they’d ever done, and it was almost relaxing at first, as the rhythm started nice and slow and neither felt the pressure to move things along. 

Nix took Dick’s cock into his mouth, licking and sucking softly as he went. Dick had bent away the leg that didn’t lie flat on the bed, but Nix hooked his arm around Dick’s thigh and pulled it over his ear. He dipped his head down, taking it in a little deeper. He felt Dick’s moan vibrate strongly around his cock, which made him want more, so he pulled back and let the whole cock slide into his mouth again, a nice little feedback loop that in a few minutes left them panting and more than a little desperate for release. 

There was nothing relaxing to their rhythm anymore; even less so when Dick’s mouth moved down, away from his cock. Nix felt strong, gentle fingers part his buttcheeks and Dick’s tongue graze the little strip of skin under his balls and the tip of his tongue lap and circle and finally push inside, not gently, not shyly, but rather like that was just another part of Nix’s body he wanted to touch, and the act itself was as normal and mundane as anything else. But oh, it felt good. Nix closed his eyes against the sensation of the rough texture of Dick’s tongue grazing the inner side of the rim; Dick's mouth pressed all around in the filthiest kind of kiss he could imagine. He extricated a hand and almost dropped it down to press the other man’s face deeper against his body.

It came to Nix then, for the first time, that all they’d been doing so far was child’s play to Dick: palliatives, stopovers on the way to the real thing. As nice and satisfactory as hands and mouths could be, they would never be as fulfilling as—

The thought of what would come next felt like a cold shower.

“Don’t,” he gasped, letting Dick’s cock slip out of his mouth. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry,” Dick said, pressing a wet kiss to Nix's thigh. He guided Nix’s cock back into his mouth, and this was better, this was something Nix could let himself enjoy.

From there things escalated nicely, and it wasn't long before they were melting into each other—Dick first, as was often the case, and Nix a close second.

Afterwards they folded the corners of the duvet over their bodies and lay together for an over-indulgent stretch of time, using each other’s thighs as a pillow. Dick started running a hand over Nix’s hip and thigh in a soothing motion, and at some point Nix must have fallen asleep under the touch, because he came to a while later, feeling groggy.

Dick’s hand had long stopped moving, but when Nix craned his neck he found him awake.

“Hey,” Dick said, a little warily.

“Hey,” Nix yawned. “Mm. Grab me a cigarette, will you.” He pointed at the spare pack sitting on his nightstand. “There’s matches in the drawer, I think.”

Dick stretched his long body, reaching an arm out; Nix felt the thigh flex under his ear. It was a beautiful thing, Dick’s body. Truly a work of art, hammered to perfection day after day. He marvelled at it sometimes, when he felt a little sappy, much like he did now.

“No matches,” Dick said, pushing the drawer closed. Nix sighed, because he was really craving a smoke, and Dick extricated himself carefully and sat up. “I’ll find your lighter.”

“You’re too good to me,” Nix declared, meaning it as a joke, though it rang painfully true. He followed Dick’s naked butt as he bent to collect the lighter from the bathroom floor and walked back in long, unhurried steps. 

Seeing each other naked was an exception, an event. Sometimes a flash of skin was all they got, and those times Nix counted himself lucky. Nix could go on for many lonely nights in his billet on a small flash of skin.

“You’re staring,” Dick said while handing him the lighter, as if he really cared about Nix’s lapse in manners.

“So are you,” Nix said, wrapping his hand around Dick’s inner thigh, an inch above the knee, and running his thumb over the skin. Because of course Dick was staring too, eyes skimming over Nix's naked leg and chest, and quite possibly thinking the same thoughts.

“Yeah,” Dick admitted, easily. “I don't know if I’ll get another chance.”

“We have a few days left.”

“Yeah,” Dick sighed, looking around the room like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

Nix released him, as a test, but Dick didn’t move. Nix lit his cigarette, exhaled slowly, and looked at the roof.

“I didn’t know that it’d feel like this,” Nix confessed at length.

“Like what?”

“Like—a honeymoon.”

Dick sat himself on the side of the bed. “What’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I just—” Nix rubbed his eye socket with the heel of his hand, and for a moment half his field of vision—with Dick in it—became a blur. “I don’t know how to do this when we’re not—Well.”

“Sneaking around?”

“Yeah.” He brushed Dick’s knee with the back of his fingers, raising his gaze slowly in small increments, until he felt confident enough to meet Dick’s eyes.

Dick looked thoughtful. “Is that why?”

“Why I acted like a prick? Yeah. Pretty much.”

There was genuine relief in Dick’s voice when he spoke next. “I thought you wanted to call it quits and couldn’t bring yourself to do it.”

Nix was silent for a moment as he processed Dick’s words. He wasn’t sure what hurt the most, that Dick thought him manipulative or that Dick thought him a coward. But that didn’t matter as much as the question he had on the tip of his tongue now, the one that really boggled his mind.

“Why on earth would I call it quits?”

Dick looked sheepish. “You’re not short of company.”

And that was the point, really, wasn’t it. That Nix wasn’t above finding company elsewhere, company that wouldn’t prompt raised eyebrows and wagging tongues, company with the right stuff in the right places, and who cares that he couldn’t pair a face and a name to save his life nor remember if the sex had been good. Sometimes a hole was just a hole and sometimes he needed things simple and easy and ready for the take, not like an uphill run every step of the way. 

How to explain this to the guy who actually _enjoyed_ running uphill, both literally and figuratively?

“I don't care,” Dick interrupted his thoughts. “Truly, I don't. But these days, I had no clue what you were thinking. I can't read you, Nix. I'm no map guy.”

“Well, the map guy is a certifiable retard, so there’s that,” Nix muttered, the self-deprecation putting a faint smile on Dick's lips. Nix sat up, putting the cigarette out in the ashtray, because he didn't want to be lying down for what he was going to say next—and hell, because he wanted to run his fingers through Dick's hair now, and so he did.

“Look, I’m not a complicated man, okay? I don't play games. When I'm tired of this, I'll come to you and say I'm tired of this. Simple as that.”

Dick leaned into his hand. “All right.”

“Are we good?”

“You tell me.”

“I say we're good if you are.”

For a moment Dick looked like he wanted to say something, but whatever that was, it didn't come out. Nix brushed his cheekbone with a thumb, and in lieu of speaking Dick turned his face into Nix's palm and kissed it.

“Let's skip the sightseeing tomorrow,” Nix said softly, entranced by the way Dick's eyes dropped half closed in response to his touch, only the tiniest sliver of grey peeking through the eyelashes.

“The staff will wonder.”

“We’ll say you’re sick.”

“Me? I’m never sick.”

“Oh, but you are. Terribly sick. Incurable.”

“You mean incorrigible?” Dick smiled.

“Yeah,” Nix breathed, leaning in. “Yeah, that too.”

  
  


**_D-Day minus 3_ **

 

Never again in his life, however long it got to be, was Nix going to see something as disturbing as Dick Winters cracking a man’s spine with his bare hands.

In Dick’s defense, Raymond Schmitz had been literally asking for it. The guy had started pestering him in the morning, pushing for a boxing match, and Dick had turned him down; unhappy, Schmitz had kept at it again and again and again with no luck, until finally he’d said: “Let’s wrestle,” and Dick had said: “All right, let’s wrestle.”

Now the guy was off to the infirmary on a stretcher, and Dick was putting his shirt back on like nothing had happened. And all of this would have made sense, sort of, but.

But Nix had seen the match, if you could call it that. He felt that an apter word could have been slaughter, or execution.

The whole thing had lasted less than a minute, carried out with Winters efficiency and surgical precision. Schmitz, an ex-boxer and a firm believer in the maxim that he who hits first, hits twice, had thrown himself at Dick aiming to compensate a smaller build with speed and agility. Dick had locked him down on his step with both arms, dropped to one side, grabbed him by both knees and in a single, swift movement he’d slammed him into the ground on his back. Nix’s imagination had probably supplied the sharp cracking noise—the guy would have been dead if his back made such a sound—but not Schmitz’s desperate cries. And that’s when Nix had known that something was off.

Because Dick, who was a fair and compassionate leader, Dick who didn’t believe in violence without a purpose, Dick who treated each man according to his deserts, looked down at this man he’d just hurt like he was nothing to him, as memorable as a squashed fly.

It was just a moment. Then he knelt down to check on the poor bastard, assessing the damage with detached courtesy, and said loud and clear to the dumbstruck crowd: “Call a medic.”

After which said poor bastard was taken away to meditate on his mistakes, the crowd dispersed, Dick put his shirt back on, and Nix was left to wonder what the hell he’d just witnessed.

“You all right?” he asked once they were alone.

“Yeah, sure,” Dick answered, buttoning up. He hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Great. Uh.” Nix scratched the back of his head uncomfortably. “Just curious. What was that about?”

“He asked for it. Insisted.”

“The guy do something to you?”

“To me?” Dick repeated, casting him a sharp look. “I just wanted him off my back.”

Nix stared at him, frowning, and for a moment neither backed down. Then Dick lowered his eyes, his cuff buttons suddenly deserving his undivided attention.

“So you’re not gonna tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Fine. Be like that.”

Nix left, feeling inexplicably irritated by the whole thing. He could have left it at that—he considered doing so—but the thought nagged at the back of his mind for the rest of the day, while he made himself busy with the hundred little tasks that were still pending.

The problem was, Lewis Nixon was great at letting big issues go by unattended and unresolved; in time he had mastered the art of self-deception that allowed him not to see what occupied his whole field of vision. But the small things, the glitches, the unexplained little oddities piqued his interest to the point of distraction.

So after dinner he went to check in on Schmitz.

Judging from the infirmary, the overall IQ of the Division was dropping fast. A few legit accidents aside, most men seemed to have hurt themselves either in a bar fight or tripping on their own shoelaces: a sad array of broken fingers, broken noses, cracked ribs, minor concussions. It made Nix frown, though the officer in him knew that they would fight better with all the extra energy, if only they managed to aim it in the right direction.

“Hey, Ray,” he said when he got in sight of Schmitz’s bed. The guy was half-lying, half-sitting, propped up against a couple of fat pillows, shirtless and sporting a bulky back brace. “How you doing?”

“Hey,” Schmitz greeted him back in a slurred voice, eyelids heavy. He looked like they’d given him something strong. “Doing great. Can’t feel a thing.”

Nix dragged a stool close to the side of the bed, sat down on it heavily. “Ain’t that the dream. What did Doc say?”

“ _Thank God that you can still walk_ ,” Schmitz mumbled, and then blinked and added morosely: “I’m missing the jump.”

“Well, then,” Nix said, taking out his hip flask. “Here’s to that.” He uncapped it and offered it to the guy, who took a full sip before giving it back. “Gotta tell you, my friend, getting on Dick’s bad side today wasn’t the smartest idea.”

“Fucking hell, he’s scary,” Schmitz chuckled, but the spasms set off the pain in his back and his laughter broke into a cough.

“Here,” Nix said, offering him the flask again. “Good to find you in high spirits, Ray, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

“Thanks, buddy. But really, you gotta—Nix, you gotta keep an eye on him. One day he’s gonna hurt somebody.” He sniggered at his own joke, sad as it was, but once again pain cut his mirth short.

Nix would have smiled at the idea—fancy that, _he_ of all people as Dick’s keeper—had he not seen his face that very day. It had been, indeed, a little scary.

“You asked for it, Ray-boy,” he said with a shrug.

“Yeah, yeah. But he said no.”

“And then you wanted to wrestle, and he said yes.”

“Uh, no. I asked, and he said no.”

“All right, but—” Nix started, feeling a mild frustration grow in his chest.

“And then I said, Why the hell not? And he said—like, that it would look bad, fighting in front of the men and all.”

Nix planted the toe of his boot on the bed rail and leaned forward. He drummed his fingers on the side of the flask. “It did. It did look bad.”

“So I said sure, you don’t wanna do it out here in front of everybody? Let’s go somewhere private, you and me.”

Nix felt the hair on his arms stand up inside the shirt sleeves, a wave of discomfort making his skin prickle.

“And he still said no, and I got real pissed. Real fuckin’ pissed. So I said—” He paused, managing to look at least a little ashamed of himself through the light morphine daze. “I said hell, wrestling with a man behind closed doors, ain’t that your kind of thing.”

Nix sighed heavily, rubbing his face with his free hand. “Jesus.”

“And _that’s_ when he said yes,” the guy concluded, in a vaguely triumphant tone. “Ask Lip, he was there.”

“Lipton?”

“Yeah. And Guarnere. A few of the men too. Luz was there, and Joe Toye, and—”

Nix stifled a groan. That the guy was an idiot he’d known for some time, and to think that he’d been made platoon leader simply baffled him. Still, the extent of this particular display of idiocy hurt him on a personal level, as if belonging to the same biological species as the guy reflected badly on him.

He stood up, stool scraping noisily against the floor. He patted Raymond Schmitz’s shoulder, perhaps a little too hard to be called friendly, but then again the guy wouldn’t have felt it if he’d kicked his balls. A pity, that, ’cause Nix’s boot itched to do some kicking.

“Enjoy your bed rest. We’ll send you a postcard.”

Dick was sitting in his tent again, holding a pair of field pants high in front of his eyes to inspect the inner lining, an unlit cigarette hanging loosely from his lips. So incongruous was the scene that Nix actually slowed down on his way to take it in, until he realized that the cigarette was actually candy and caught a glimpse of something attached to the inner seam of the trousers.

“Escape map?”

Dick nodded.

“Smart,” Nix said, hovering under the folded flap of the tent. “Will you do mine? I ditched home economics in school.”

Dick threw him a glance, then shook his head in a way that meant he was not in the mood for a joke. Not a hearty welcome, but in light of recent circumstances Nix wouldn’t be too picky.

He entered and pulled the flap closed, tying it in place. Dick had a gas lamp on his tiny desk, which was sufficient to illuminate a two-bed tent, though it cast a rather gloomy light. Nix sat gingerly next to him on the cot.

“Who’s replacing Schmitz?”

“Matthews,” Dick answered around the candy cigarette.

“Mm.”

“He’s next in line.”

“He’ll do. Platoon leaders sure are in short supply these days. I saw three of them at the infirmary, two with paper cuts.”

Dick put away the trousers. He grabbed the candy stick between his thumb and forefinger and pulled it to the front of his mouth, sucking on it with a soft, distracting sound.

“Couple of men came by earlier. Offered me five dollars,” he said taking the candy out of his mouth.

“For what?”

“To break their arm.”

Nix huffed a laughter. “Lovely. Not from Easy?”

“Oh, no. They wouldn’t think of it.”

Nix intercepted Dick’s hand on its way back to his mouth and pulled it to himself, stealing the candy cigarette with his teeth. The tip was wet with Dick’s saliva and tasted like plain sugar.

“I’ve got a whole pack of them,” Dick said.

“Gave mine away for smokes,” Nix said, biting on the end of the stick to see if chewing made it better (it didn’t). “How did you report it, by the way?”

“Schmitz? Training injury.”

Nix scoffed. “Well, he was taught a lesson, that’s for sure.”

“That’s not why I did it.”

“I know, but it’s just as well. The little shit deserved it.”

Dick pulled his feet up on the cot, crossing his legs. “Half a platoon was standing there,” he said, with a quiet outrage in his voice.

“I know.”

“I won’t have the men think that I’ll chicken out when things get real. Can’t afford that kind of doubt. There’s enough rumors as it is.”

“There’s no rumors about _that_ ,” Nix said. He would have known. He liked to say that it was his job to keep his ears open, but really, he was just a sucker for gossip.

“Not yet,” Dick replied.

Nix held back a sigh. How unfair that Dick should have to worry about losing the respect of his men over whether or not he let the last asshole in the company call him a fruit. Bunch of kids they were, every last one of them.

“Dick, they love you. No, really, it’s ridiculous. It gets any more ridiculous, I’ll bet the new rumor will be: ‘Easy Company line up every morning outside Lieutenant Winters’ tent to suck him off.’ That’s how much they love you.”

That got a chuckle out of him, at least, though it didn’t stick. Dick rested his head against the tarp wall of the tent and exhaled slowly. He turned his face to Nix.

There it was again, the somber Winters look, the subdued attitude that was starting to grate on Nix’s nerves.

“We should catch some sleep,” Dick said, not moving.

“We’ve got time.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know. Talk. Be alive.”

Nix wouldn’t have known how to explain it, but it bothered him, leaving Dick alone when he looked like that. Being away from him made his skin tingle unpleasantly. After all, he’d left him to his own devices for half a day, and look at the result.

“Nix. What is it?”

“If you must know, a reliable source told me I ought to keep an eye on you,” he answered, putting on his best smile.

“Tell them that it’s not needed.”

“This is the problem, you see,” Nix replied, voice dropping to a murmur. “I think they’re right.”

Dick looked back at him with such quiet, burning intensity that it almost made Nix call it quits, raise his arms in mock surrender and pretend it had all been a joke. Maybe that was what Schmitz had seen before launching himself at Dick; maybe that was what had made him lose his cool and throw away his fighting chance to win the match by provoking a doomed frontal assault.

“Lew, we jump tomorrow,” Dick said.

“So they say.” _Lew_ , huh. “They say we might die, too. Though I wouldn’t know about that. I say we’re pretty invincible.”

Dick’s eyes shot to the tent flap, then focused back on Nix. He looked at Nix’s mouth, at Nix’s eyes. For a moment it looked like he would waver, but then his gaze turned stern. 

“I’ll go to sleep now,” he said, pushing himself off the cot and onto his feet. “Thank you for coming by, Nix. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah,” Nix said, considering with a vague sense of emptiness the increased distance between their bodies. “Any time.”

Nix’s spine was not cracked, and yet walking upright felt unnaturally hard when he made his way across camp.

  
  


**_Easter 1944, England_ **

 

Kathy’s letter reached him a few days before Easter.

Nix had almost written one of his own. A couple of weeks ahead, he’d sat down at his desk at battalion headquarters and jotted down the beginning:

 

_My dear Kat,_

 

At which point he’d regretted not doing it the day before, when he was feeling a little homesick, more in the mood to pour his heart out like a good Army husband. He’d procrastinated, what with the hundred little things to do, and maybe that night he’d gone to check on Dick or maybe not, maybe he’d gone out with Harry or not, maybe he’d followed a pretty skirt home—or not. Hard to remember now. Whatever the distraction, when the next day he’d tried to put something together his brain had refused to cooperate. He’d saved the aborted draft in his drawer, as good as buried, and managed to forget all about it.

And now Kathy’s letter sat on his desk. Probably, it had been there since the morning mail delivery.

Nix had never been one to savor things slowly. He would, of course, sip expensive wine rather than down it like a pint of beer, and he wasn’t insensitive to the charm of taking it slow in other departments, but in general he liked getting things hard and fast. He didn’t, as a rule, linger.

That’s why he browsed through three pages of Kathy’s familiar cursive in less than a minute. He took in the sweet parts, the funny bits, and all the rest in between. He felt a frown form and tighten between his eyes. By the time he’d reached the end he realized that there was a wallet-size picture of Mikey in the envelope, frowning back at him with the uncanny depth of an eighteen-month-old.

 He read the letter a second time and a third and finally folded it, pushed it back into its envelope with the photograph and locked it in his drawer.

Then, since it was a Monday and shortly after nineteen-hundred, he retired to the house where he was billeted and medicated himself to sleep with half a flask of Vat 69.

The next morning he was slightly hungover, which was not particularly surprising to anyone, except Dick who, for some reason, eyed him carefully like he’d never seen him in that state before. He didn’t say anything, though, and most importantly he didn’t _ask_ when later in the day Nix popped up at the Barnes residence for a refill. The footlocker was already open, lock hanging from its hook with the combination in plain sight. Nix took a mental note, because his brain worked like that, and since he was a gentleman he lied to himself that he would never use it without permission.

With the big jump approaching, a good third of the regiment had been granted exceptional passes for a three-day weekend starting on Maundy Thursday. From where Nix was standing, Thursday night was as remote a prospect as retirement, D-Day, or death. He clung onto it in a precarious balance between fury and despair, and in that mental state he dragged himself on through the day.

Thursday was one long hangover. Truth be told, he wasn’t the only one who’d given in to the temptation of an early check-out: the men, excited about the weekend pass, were lax and distracted and only interested in chatting about their plans, much like young girls comparing dates. And if Nix’s position made him particularly conspicuous, he had at least enough sense to quietly slip under the radar, making himself marginally useful with minimum effort. 

Yet he couldn’t swear that he was fooling everyone, or anyone, and he certainly wasn’t fooling Mother Superior Richard Winters, who at some point in the evening regarded him with such obvious, barely restrained concern that Nix felt obliged to laugh in his face.

Three days into the Vat treatment, his mood had significantly improved. He felt numb, wrapped all around in cotton wool and soft enough around the edges to allow a convivial impulse to take over, which is to say that he was slowly drifting away from the dark compulsion to drink his liver raw in solitude to a lighter disposition where he would allow himself to achieve the same goal in friendly company.

There was an understanding between the Command and the local community that Aldbourne was not hunting ground for the men. Now Harry Welsh famously had little interest in hunting, so when Nix went to smoke him out at the Barnes residence and proposed a quiet drinking night at the Blue Boar, he thought it’d be a sure deal. But Harry looked like he’d rather cut off his own balls—his own blue, blue balls—than go the pub with him.

Dick came up at that point, or maybe he’d been there the whole time, and Harry turned to him as if to look for help—help with what?—which was at the very least ironic, since Dick knew nothing of pubs, drinking nights, and God forbid hunting grounds—except maybe maybe _maybe_ some of a special kind, but who knew really, and anyway that was neither here nor there.

“Some of the guys are going to Swindon,” Harry admitted.

“Great. Let’s go,” Nix said.

Harry hesitated. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at Dick again.

“Or you could stay here,” Dick said, making a face that suggested that the idea was only marginally less distasteful.

Nix had no idea what that face was for, nor frankly what Dick had to do with the conversation—and he said so, perhaps not too kindly.

“Hey, come on, Nix. No need to be like that,” Harry started, but Dick interrupted him.

“Fine. You want to go? Let’s go.”

Nix gaped at him a little, feeling like he had missed a beat. “Where?”

“To have a drink.”

Nix chortled in disbelief, but Dick’s face was stone. And so they went out.

Later Nix would find huge gaps in his recollection of the night, but for the first couple of hours he was quite alert, up until the point where he invited a spirited little blonde to the dance floor. Nix wouldn’t remember her name nor what her face looked like, but he would distinctly remember thinking, _She’s got enough self-esteem not to dance with a drunk_ , which proved _ipso facto_ that he had been sober then, or at least that he’d managed to keep his mouth shut.

Other than the color of her hair, Nix would remember a pretty, not at all bashful young smile and a flash of white calves glinting suggestively in the dim light.

And he had kissed her—hadn’t he? Not in the bar, but later, outside. But he had not taken her home, that much was certain, because the next thing he remembered was being put to bed by big, strong, unwomanly hands. Fingers peeled him out of his clothes and let him slump back on the pillow, carefully enough that the room only set into a gentle spin.

“Haven’t seen him like this before,” someone said by his feet.

“I have.” A pause, some muffled speech. “Yeah, he’ll be all right.”

“I can stay with him. Hell, you don’t even drink.”

Nix was getting sleepy now, and the conversation was not particularly interesting. He closed his eyes and dozed off for a while, and when he came to he was alone and the room dark and quiet.

He turned around in the unfamiliar bed, burying his face in a pillow that smelled like laundry soap and starch. He was thirsty. His tongue felt like sandpaper and there was a rancid taste at the back of his mouth. He pushed himself up on an elbow, then stumbled onto his sock-clad feet.

He had slept in enough hotel rooms, and passed out in a few more still, to know one in the dark—something about the stuffy base smell threw them all together, from the Paris Ritz to the shittiest motel. Thank God this one had a private lavatory: Nix struggled to reach it from his bed, let alone crossing the whole corridor in the dark.

He braced himself against the rim of the sink and leaned in, drinking straight from the tap. When he looked up at the mirror he was pleased to find that at least his dishevelled face looked more funny than pitiful.

“You all right?” a voice called from the door, and Nix realized that he’d been standing there looking at his reflection for a while.

He turned his head. Dick looked funny, too, with that mop of red hair falling floppily on his forehead. He wasn’t even trying to comb it back or anything, which figured, as Dick was way more tolerant of his own imperfection in the bedroom—or as it were, in the bathroom. What would Sobel have said to that look? Nevermind—Sobel was gone. Nix smiled.

“Never better,” he answered, even though his stomach was a heartburning mess.

Dick nodded wearily. “Come to bed?”

“Yeah, yeah. Gotta take a leak.”

It was at some point mid-piss that he realized that Dick was still standing there, not exactly watching him, but yeah, watching him, which struck him as the weirdest thing a man could do, watch another man piss. Lucky for Nix, he’d never been piss-shy in his life.

“You’ve seen it before, haven’t you,” he mumbled, and Dick quietly stepped out.

Nix stumbled back into the room and between the two beds and slumped heavily on his mattress. He now found himself at that miserable stage where the only two options were to either drink more and chase that happy numbness again, or just give in to the inevitable hangover and get back to sleep.

Nix looked at his hands, then up. He’d left the light on in the bathroom, and it shone on Dick’s face, making him look like a pale ginger ghost.

“I need a drink,” Nix said.

“There’s water.”

“Water doesn’t do shit for you. I need a beer. Ask Harry.”

“He’s not here.”

“Where is he then?”

“Back home.”

“In Pennsylvania?”

“Aldbourne, Nix. He’s back in Aldbourne.”

Nix shook his head and tried to stand up in one movement—a bad idea, and the only result was that the headache set its teeth deeper into his skull. He staggered, knees bending under his weight, but Dick grabbed him by both arms. Quite the magic trick he’d pulled, materializing in front of him like that.

“All right, Nix, back to sleep with you,” Dick said, laying him down on the mattress. He reached around Nix’s body to grab a handful of crumpled sheets and pulled them over Nix’s chest.

Nix tried to resist, but his head sunk into the pillow like a knife through butter, and suddenly he found that he had no strength left to fight. He smiled, chewing up Dick’s words in his mind. “Sleep with me, uh?” he murmured.

“Not tonight,” Dick answered, tucking the sheets under Nix’s chin. His hand lingered, though, and his knuckles brushed Nix’s jaw.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re drunk.”

“You think I can’t get it up? Think I got a whiskey dick?” _Hehe, a whiskey Dick._

“I think I need to sleep.”

Nix closed his eyes. Eventually Dick left him; at some point the light in the bathroom went off. Nix turned to his side and barely registered it when the other bed creaked under Dick’s weight, consciousness already plunging down with sleep.

He woke up again some time after dawn, which probably meant eight, nine o’clock. He was aware of it because the sunlight filtered through the battered blinds and hit his face at just the right angle to turn everything orange behind his eyelids. He rolled around.

The problem with waking up hungover wasn’t so much that his head hurt and his mouth tasted like the bottom of a garbage bin, though he could have done without any of that. The problem was that as soon as he regained consciousness, he remembered, and once he’d remembered he knew that nothing short of a whole bottle of Vat would tuck the memory away.

He opened his eyes. Dick was still asleep, cheek pressed on the pillow, lips slightly parted.

Nix sat up slowly and even more slowly got on his feet, fighting every mute suggestion his body was throwing at him to please, please just stay in bed. He dragged himself over to the chair in the corner and found his trousers folded on the backrest, hip flask sitting next to them. Empty.

Nix always saved about a quarter of the flask for an emergency, but by now he’d been hungover for three days, with a few lucid breaks here and there, and he couldn’t say for sure where the missing whiskey had gone. In his stomach, he assumed. He felt a surge of fury at his past self, the greedy bastard. What the hell was he thinking, not leaving a single drop behind?

He smacked the backrest and the chair fell backwards with a clang that pierced through his muffled ears, startling him. The sound was still echoing in his head when a calloused hand wrapped around his elbow.

“Nix,” Dick said, voice clear and crisp like he hadn’t slept for a second.

“I’m fine,” he said reflexively.

“Come on.”

The hand and the poised tone dislodged a memory in Nix’s brain. Something about his parents, many years past: Stanhope as wasted as can be, Doris patiently herding him to the bedroom, five thin fingers wrapped firmly around his arm.

“Don’t coddle me,” Nix growled, snatching his hand away. “I’m not a kid.”

“You sure are doing your best impression of one,” Dick replied, dryly.

Nix frowned at the change of tone. “So what? Why do you care? What the fuck are you doing here, eh?”

Dick’s jaw tightened in the hard, clenched expression he usually reserved for the likes of Sobel, the irritating portion of mankind he had long given up on. “Looking after you,” he said flatly. “Making sure you don’t choke on your own vomit.”

“I’m alive, aren’t I? You can go now.”

Dick didn’t reply to that. He walked back to the bed, grabbed his clothes and put them on with neat, scary efficiency, and all the while Nix just stood and stared as his shoulder blades flexed and relaxed under his T-shirt, his OD shirt, his jacket, his coat. Then Dick grabbed his wallet from the nightstand, didn’t bother looking back, and headed to the door.

The squalor of the hotel room closed upon Nix like a blanket. The carpeting smell that he had barely noticed in the night suddenly seemed suffocating. He shuffled to the window and yanked it open, yearning for open air and a slice of sky, only to be faced by an ugly brick wall. He looked down, the mild nausea enough to trigger vertigo. When he turned he saw Dick looking at him, a foot out of the room and a hand wrapped around the doorknob. He had an uncertain, alarmed expression.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Nix said, pushing the window closed. “Just—” He shook his head, leaving the sentence hanging. He dragged himself back to the bed and sat down heavily, body folding forward.

“What is it?” Dick asked.

Nix swallowed and made to speak, but when the words formed in his mind the irony of his situation hit him hard. He chuckled, rubbing his face roughly with both hands.

“She met someone,” he said.

The door closed. Dick’s lower body walked into his field of vision and sat itself down on the opposite bed, close at hand but comfortably far. Nix was grateful for the distance.

“I’m sorry,” Dick said. He fidgeted with the edge of his coat, thumbnail scratching the wool. “What are you going to do?”

“Depends. Is there an open pub in this shithole?”

“I mean with Kathy.”

Nix looked up, meeting a sympathetic, almost doleful face, and shit, he realized, Dick was actually sorry for him.

“Nothing,” he said.

Dick was silent for a moment. “I see.”

“No, you don’t,” Nix chuckled bitterly. “You don't. We’re not like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like—”

Oh, how he craved a drink right now. This was not a conversation he thought he would be having sober, not with anyone, not in a place like this. He’d always pictured himself with a fancy New York bar as backdrop, tumbler in hand, Kathy at his arm with her best smile on. _My lady and I, we are a modern couple._

“We have an agreement.”

Dick leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. A small frown had formed between his eyebrows, a field problem frown: his brain was ticking, but not yet grasping the answer.

“It’s fine,” Nix said, eyes cowering under the other’s careful scrutiny. “She should have her fun. It’s not like I don’t.”

Dick reached out and touched his knee. Reflexively, Nix rested his own hand on Dick’s, and Dick’s wrist turned so that their palms were touching. For a moment no one spoke, and Nix thought that if the next thing he heard from Dick was another question he wouldn’t be able to stand it, he wouldn’t know how to cope.

But the frown had disappeared from Dick’s face, replaced by a quiet understanding. His thumb reached up to stroke the back of Nix’s hand in a slow, steady caress, a comforting little gesture.

“You don’t need to like it,” he said.

“What kind of a hypocrite do you think I am?”

“You have to accept it,” Dick insisted. “It doesn’t mean that you have to _like_ it.”

Nix asked himself where Dick’s wisdom came from, and he hated it when he read the answer on the other’s face. The realization left him shaken and guilty and nauseated, an avalanche of bad feelings he instinctively tried to reject. But Dick’s face was still there, and so was his hand, and the thumb was still caressing him ever-so-gently, and Nix’s snarky remark died on the tip of his tongue.

“Anything I can do?” Dick asked softly.

Nix sighed, which Dick seemed to take as a sign. Slowly, he leaned in and brought Nix’s palm to his lips. It wasn't sexual, not especially, and yet the gesture combined with the demure, almost reverent way Dick closed his eyes when he kissed Nix’s hand always hit the spot. It did now, too.

Dick opened his eyes, which looked pale green in the morning light. He was still holding Nix’s hand, and a part of Nix found it funny that Dick would want to be close to him when Nix felt like a pile of human garbage. Then again, maybe sex was just another offer on the table: anything, he’d said, _Anything I can do_ , which could mean equally a glass of water and a blowjob.

He reached out, fingers brushing the underside of Dick’s jaw, his chin, his throat. Dick looked unsurprised, and yet Nix felt his Adam’s apple bob in a single, startled jerk.

“Come here,” Nix murmured. “Stand up.”

Dick hesitated. He still had his coat on, unbuttoned. Nix hooked two fingers in Dick’s belt and pulled him between his own spread knees, then started working the buckle and the trousers. By the time he was done with the last button, Dick was half hard. Nix gently pulled Dick’s cock out and bent his head to take it into his mouth.

He clasped his lips firmly around the shaft and traced the ridge under the head with the tip of his tongue, a few times. In response Dick let out a small sound, almost a whimper, and one hand rose to rest lightly on Nix’s shoulder.

Nix sunk deeper inside Dick’s coat, fighting back the nausea out of sheer will, cock heavy and imposing on his tongue, its smooth head pressing lightly against the roof of his mouth.

He grabbed Dick’s wrist, extricating Dick’s fingers from the strap of his undershirt, and held it fast for a moment to feel the pulse, which was strong and accelerated and a perfect match for the faint drumming in his own fingertips. His eyes looked upwards for the briefest moment. He caught a glimpse of a face splotched with pink and a flash of teeth.

“Lew,” Dick sighed, voice raspy and quivering. His hand cupped the back of Nix’s head and his fingers tightened lightly on his skull. Nix breathed out through his nose, letting himself be drawn closer, closer, welcoming the pressure even as it made it more difficult to keep the gag reflex at bait.

“God, yes. Like that,” Dick rambled, the rare profanity escaping his mouth and ending up buried in a litany of urgent pleas.

Nix knew that he couldn’t take all the merit for how eagerly Dick responded to his touch, because the man firmly denied himself pleasure elsewhere. The knowledge made Nix frown as often as it elated him, but right now it felt just right that he was the only one allowed to do this. That Nix could stop if he wanted, stall him, torture him, as unfair as that could be. That he alone in the whole wide world could hear Dick Winters beg.

Dick’s hand on his nape urged him on, thumb latched in the dimple under Nix’s ear, angled so that he would be able to feel the tensing and releasing of Nix’s jaw as Nix slid up and down his cock, pausing to lick the head, open-mouthed, to circle it with a slow, obscene revolution of his tongue.

“Nix,” Dick moaned, eyes transfixed on Nix’s mouth.

Nix thrust his hand above Dick’s waistband, into the warm cocoon under all the layers, wrapping his fingers around a palpitating hip. He gripped Dick’s cock at the base, stroking it in and out of his mouth, and meanwhile he spread his palm on Dick’s hip and let it travel closer to where his nose was, brushing coarse hair under his thumb. He moved the hand down Dick’s thigh, inspired, and pushed the thumb into the tender, damp flesh between Dick’s thighs. Dick parted his legs reflexively, and then immediately looked down at Nix with a flash of guilt, flustered, arrested.

Nix turned his wrist and thrust his index and middle finger between Dick’s thighs, brushing his balls and the sliver of skin right under, pushing down the waistband further with the weight of his hand. Dick tensed for a moment, flesh closing nicely around Nix’s fingers.

Nix pulled his head back and looked up.

“Anything you want,” Dick whispered.

“A glass of water would be nice,” Nix replied with a grin, and Dick frowned in confusion.

“Nevermind. Here, lie down.” He maneuvered Dick so that he had him on the bed on his back, and grabbing with both hands he pulled Dick’s trousers and pants down to his knees. Half naked like that, Dick’s arousal looked almost intimidating, but by now Nix was well past feeling intimidated.

He carefully drew his fingers back between Dick’s legs and Dick immediately parted them wide, the gesture punctuated by a small sigh.

“You’ll let me fuck you?” Nix murmured.

“Yes,” Dick answered, softly and clearly.

“Why?”

He wasn’t sure why he had even asked, and he soon realized that he might not like the answer. If Dick said that he wanted to give it to him, that it was to make him _happy_ , Nix didn’t know that he could take it.

“I want you to,” Dick said.

Nix inhaled, nostrils flared, and pressed the pad of his middle finger against the tight circle of flesh, not quite pushing in yet. When he did, he was surprised at how tender and inviting it felt around his first knuckle.

He bent his head down, resuming where he had left off. When he swallowed Dick's cock and pushed his finger in at the same time, Dick let out a strangled noise, tensing sharply.

“Oh, for—Lew,” he grunted, hand shooting up to grip Nix’s shoulder.

Nix hummed around his cock and pulled halfway out, pushing it back in time with the next descent of his mouth, the gasping sound he got out of Dick so desperately beautiful that he felt his uncooperative arousal finally stir in his pants.

“Yes. Yes,” Dick grunted, voice veined with pleasure and something more visceral, something almost like pain. “So close. Please.”

Nix held Dick's hip down and relaxed his throat, ready, but he wasn't expecting Dick's muscles to clench so hard around his finger as he came, easing and tightening in time with pleasure.

He sat up, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and gave himself a moment to take in the mess he’d made of Lieutenant Winters. Dick’s coat was still on, open and spread under his back like a blanket, his shirt crumpled up, pants rolled down, cock hard and flushed and glistening with come and saliva. He looked beautiful in a way that Nix vaguely felt nobody should be allowed to see. He looked, more than anything, utterly fuckable.

Nix ran a gentle hand up and down Dick’s thigh. He toyed with the idea of making Dick keep his clothes on, but even as he considered it Dick pushed himself slowly up and wiggled his arms out of his coat.

Nix took off Dick's shoes and trousers, dumping them on the floor. Neither bothered with the shirt, but Dick loosened his tie and undid the first button, somehow managing to look way more indecent by virtue of that simple infraction to the Army dress code.

Nix knelt between Dick’s legs, hand moving back to touch him, but the moment he tried to press his finger inside Dick let out a sharp sigh.

“No?” Nix frowned.

“Come here for a moment,” Dick said, drawing Nix’s hand away. He pulled Nix to him, down to his mouth for a long, sloppy kiss that cut off Nix’s breath and set his ears ringing. It couldn’t taste too nice, kissing him after all of that, but Dick ran his hands on Nix’s arms and kissed him again and again like he was in no hurry for it to stop. When at some point Nix ventured a hand again down Dick’s thigh, Dick broke the kiss only to spell one breathless word. “Wait.”

“What?” Nix asked.

Dick fished Nix’s hand out of the space between their bodies and brought it to his mouth. Nix watched, mesmerized, as Dick flickered his tongue around and between Nix’s index and middle finger, drawing them into his mouth to suck them whole. When he had them wet to his liking, he moved on to provide the same ministrations to the ring finger, the gesture causing a surge of arousal to Nix’s groin.

“All right,” Dick murmured, guiding Nix’s hand back down. He bent a leg up, offering a better access. “Yeah,” he sighed when Nix touched him, eyelids trembling shut.

Nix looked down at the work at hand, appreciating the newfound ease with which his finger slid inside. “Been a while?” he asked, conversationally.

Dick sighed, Nix’s finger buried deep inside him to the knuckle. “You could say that.”

Nix took his own half-hard cock out of his pants, stroking it as he managed a second finger. They sighed together this time, a nice little harmony.

Nix kept at it for a while, sliding gently in and out, but as much as he tried he couldn’t get his ring finger in.

“It’s all right,” Dick said after some unfruitful minutes.

Nix glanced at Dick’s frown. “You sure?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. Come here.”

Nix pushed down his boxers and knelt closer, running one hand on Dick’s leg and getting himself fully hard with the other. “Like this?” he asked, meaning their position. “You like it like this?”

“Yeah,” Dick nodded. He propped himself up on a hand, hooking the other around the back of Nix’s neck, and pulled him down firmly for another kiss. While they kissed, Dick drew his knees up around Nix’s hips and adjusted himself so that the angle was right.

Nix looked down between their bodies, at once awed that Dick would let him do something like this and struck by a sudden rush of panic at the idea of actually doing it. He looked up at Dick’s face, which was flushed and expectant, neck craned up and tense, and then he suddenly thought of Kathy on her back, brow wrinkled in a mix of concentration and abandon as she orgasmed, all her beautiful tiny freckles covered by the blood rushing to her face.

“Lew,” Dick called softly.

Nix shook himself, took his cock in his hand and lined up with Dick’s body.

He tried to ease himself in, carefully at first, then a little more forcefully, but Dick’s body would have none of it. His flesh didn’t feel tender anymore, nor welcoming; more like a wall. He tried again, muttering to himself in frustration, but the more he did the more he felt his erection diminish—and no surprise either, since there was nothing arousing in trying to break into a body that would not have him.

He pulled back, briefly trying to resuscitate his limp cock, more out of a perfunctory courtesy than of a real desire to get back to it. Finally he gave up completely and fell back on his heels with an angry sigh. His hands shot up to his hair, pushing it furiously out of his face.

He looked down.

He caught Dick’s face as it relaxed, and what must have been a deep frown disappeared quickly. Dick’s right hand, which had risen to grab the edge of the pillow close to his ear, was releasing its grip, leaving behind the chewed corner of the pillow case. He looked at Nix, eyes weary, and breathed out a small and unmistakable sigh of relief.

Nix felt a flood of shame and nausea gather in his stomach. He put a hand up to his mouth and forced down a sudden gush of foul-tasting saliva. Gagging into his hand, Nix rolled off the bed and stumbled across the room. He narrowly made it to the toilet before the first wave of vomit rushed out of his mouth.

  
  


**_D-Day minus 2_ **

 

Dick attended the church service out in the field with the men, sitting front and center, while Nix merely lingered, content with observing from a comfortable distance. The Catholics had a Mass going on not far, and a smaller Jewish service was taking place a little further still. The atmosphere was somber, the chaplains’ voices carrying out far and almost overlapping in the stunned, fizzling silence that reigned since the early hours.

Dick's head stood out in the sea of khaki like a poppy in a swamp.

That morning at dawn the officers had received their last briefing and the order to ready the trucks for the big take-off. Afterwards, Nix had followed Dick out into the grey-blue morning that stretched ahead of them. He had meant to talk to him, smooth things out, gently pry out a sign that all was fine, but be it the early rise or the naked worry on Dick's face, Nix’s silver tongue had seemingly dried out, leaving him to blabber only inconsequential small talk. Something about Chicago, happy hours, and the weather. _I'll take you there_ , he'd said on impulse, because he liked promising Dick places—though the only time he’d actually taken him anywhere he hadn't promised ahead, just up and done it—but Dick had deflected, looking away, searching for something behind the clouds. No, it wasn't going to clear out.

The service was over. The soldiers shuffled towards the mess hall and Nix resisted the urge to meet Dick's eyes like he would normally do. He kept looking forward and left, far away, into the horizon. Dick walked him by without a word.

At lunch they were served spaghetti and ice cream for dessert. Nix hadn't been able to stomach spaghetti since Toccoa, but he knew that they were due a light dinner before take-off and that was it, there was no certainty when they would get the next real meal. So he rolled his fork and chewed the food mechanically, in big mouthfuls, blocking out the taste and the memory of mountain trail runs.

In front of him, Dick looked like he was trying to do the same, if the downward turn of his mouth was any indication. Harry looked happy enough with his meal, but then again, he'd never had spaghetti á _la_ _Toccoa_. Nix doubted he'd even been told the story, and when Harry noticed the looks on their faces and asked what was wrong, Nix took it upon himself to rectify. Harry laughed dutifully.

“Is Black Swan jumping too?” Harry asked. 

Nix nodded, helping the food down with a sip of water.

“Imagine meeting him on the other side,” Harry grinned. 

Nix scoffed. “If he makes it that far.” 

“Or if we do,” Dick said, moving the last few strands of spaghetti around in his plate.

Harry cleared his throat, and Dick looked up from his plate as if he'd just realized the effect of what he'd said.

“I'm gonna go out for a smoke,” Nix announced, pushing his chair back.

Dick pointed at Nix's tray with his fork. “You left your ice cream.”

Nix took his store-bought ice cream cup and moved it to Dick's tray, next to the one already sitting there. “With my compliments.”

He had just lit his cigarette when Harry joined him outside. Nix offered him his pack, and when Harry declined, he silently handed him the hip flask.

“You know, I talked to him the other day,” Harry said, taking a sip. “Cheers.”

“Who?”

“Sobel. He was not as bad as I remembered.”

“You mean now that he's not your CO?”

Harry shrugged. “I guess that helps.”

“Well, you'll excuse me if I don't join the fan club.”

They stood in silence next to each other, Nix slowly smoking the cigarette down to the filter, Harry holding onto the flask.

“That court-martial business with Dick sure was ugly,” Harry said.

“Yeah,” Nix agreed. “It was.”

“Did you know there was a rumor?”

“Which one?”

“That he knew about the mutiny.” Harry paused, frowning a little. “That he instigated it.”

Nix chuckled humorlessly. “That's precious. Who told you? Sobel?”

Harry didn't answer. “He wouldn't,” he said instead. “Dick wouldn't.”

“Of course not,” Nix replied. “Why are you bringing this up?”

Harry leaned his back against the wall. “He just got me thinking, is all. Dick wouldn't. But you might.”

Nix looked back at Harry, then at the cigarette between his fingers, and lazily flicked the ash out on the ground.

“That’s a serious accusation there, buddy,” he said slowly.

Harry looked as peaceful as ever, but there was a glimpse of steel behind his friendly composure. Nix caught sight of it every now and then; sometimes he had to remind himself of having seen it, like on the nights when Harry methodically drowned it in booze.

“I'm not accusing you. I'm just thinking, in all that mess someone must have come to you for advice.”

“Yeah, because that's what people do around here. Come to me for advice,” Nix snorted.

“They do,” Harry replied. “Not that your advice is good,” he added, grinning around the mouth of the flask, “but you’re damn good at selling it.”

Nix glanced at him, uncertain whether he liked Harry’s earnest appraisal or not, and decided that it didn’t matter either way. 

“He would've got you all killed,” he said finally, and Harry nodded, unfazed.

“Dick doesn't know?”

“There's nothing to know.”

“So he doesn't.”

“You hear me, Harry?”

“I hear you.”

All around them the air had turned warm and humid, as if the sky were ready to break into a summer storm. Nix imagined flying in the middle of that, jumping in the middle of that, and the hair on his arms stood up uncomfortably inside his shirt sleeves.

“Can't have been too easy,” Harry said conversationally, to which Nix replied with a noncommittal grunt. “One might think,” Harry continued, “that it would've been harder than sorting out whatever the fuck is wrong with you two.”

Nix was unsurprised. It just made sense that Harry would notice something was off, obvious as it was. He realized that he had never considered Harry a particularly observant fellow; smart, sure, but also a little oblivious. Perhaps he’d been ungenerous.

“Staying sober for a day doesn’t make you Sigmund Freud, Harry.”

“You don’t need Freud for this. Hell, you don’t need brains, either. Just apologize for fucking up and we all go our merry way.”

“Thanks for assuming _I_ fucked up,” he replied, feeling inexplicably petty about it.

“Well, didn't you?”

Nix looked away and discarded the chewed-up cigarette butt. “I’m not sure that it can be sorted out,” he said in lieu of an answer.

“Of course it can,” Harry replied. Then, when Nix didn’t add anything, he let out a small sigh and returned the flask. “Look, I need my platoon leader. Can you work on it? Call it a favor to a friend.”

Nix shook his head, but he mumbled: “I’ll try.”

“Thanks.” Harry patted Nix's shoulder before walking away.

They were already loading the planes, a few hours later, when Hester told him that they were wanted at regiment.

“Now?” Nix replied, feeling a surge of annoyance. At this stage a regiment meeting could only mean one of two things: either they were not jumping, or new intel had come in. Nix hoped it was the first, although the idea of putting the whole thing on hold made his stomach churn. He didn't like last-minute intel. It was rarely good news.

Hester pointed at the sky, which had gotten even darker and cloudier, and shrugged.

So the bad news was that they were on a 24-hour stand-down. The good news was that there was no news. The stand-down had been ordered because of the weather, not because all their intel on the Normandy causeways had proven to be a pile of horseshit. Nix felt relieved. The plan stood. The higher-ups would not risk this jump, not after the mess they had made of the Sicily drop.

They were so concerned about not fucking it up, in fact, that one hour after the news they announced a special movie night, ostensibly to keep the men’s spirits high.

Nix went reluctantly. The alternative would have been to drink the rest of his flask in blissful solitude in his tent, but that would have implied a visit to Dick’s footlocker somewhere in the near future, and he wasn’t sure that he was ready to deal with that kind of awkwardness. 

The movie had already started. Nix hadn’t been to the cinematographer in months, and he had no taste for the heroic, sentimental drivel that the Army provided to them on a regular basis. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen a single picture since Edinburgh.

On the screen, Cary Grant was being effortlessly one-upped by a beautiful, stern-looking Laraine Day.

_“We've had a few men before, but they all asked to be transferred to more active branches. So many women around get on their nerves.”_

_“That won't bother me,”_ Grant promised.

_“I might have known.”_

Nix slouched a little on his chair, trying to find a comfortable position. The armchairs in Edinburgh had been softer, and he had been sitting right next to Dick, not several rows behind. At some point Dick's hand had brushed and touched and held his for a second, and that might explain why Nix couldn't remember the first thing about the plot, seeing as he’d spent the rest of the film fantasizing about Dick on his knees in the dark room.

It wasn't as visible as out in the airfield in plain daylight, but he could still easily locate Dick's red hair among the many dark heads around him, courtesy of the white light reflecting off the screen. He sat at the left edge of his row, by the aisle, his composure no less serious here than it had been at the morning service. Back up straight, head tilted upwards, he might've been praying to the gods of Hollywood to lead them not into temptation.

Nix patted himself for his cigarette pack and remembered with supreme annoyance that he was fresh out. He crossed his arms on his chest despondently.

“ _We want a group of obviously masculine men to take up knitting. Do it perfectly casually in public places.”_

_“You think I’m strong enough?”_

Nix stood half up and walked in a crouch to the seat behind Dick, which was occupied by one of the new troopers Easy had picked up in England. The name escaped him, but trust Nix to recognize a face he didn't like. Snapping his fingers, he pointed at the empty seat on the guy's right.

“Scoot over, young man,” he ordered. The guy’s face snapped up with a pissed-off expression, but then he recognized Nix and obeyed, albeit sulkily.

“Hey,” Nix said, tapping Dick's left arm.

Dick turned his head sideways.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Nix smiled.

The corner of Dick's mouth raised a tiny fraction before he turned back to face the screen.

“Got a cigarette?” Nix asked, and Dick shook his head.

“Liar. I know all about your—”, someone shushed him, “—secret stash,” Nix finished, leaning forward to whisper directly into Dick's ear.

Dick's neck made a little jerky movement, not quite a shiver, but something not too far either.

“I don't have any here,” Dick whispered back.

“Then let's go pick them up,” Nix insisted.

“I'm watching the movie.”

“You saw it last week.” 

Dick didn't react to this, and Nix leaned back against his chair, feeling miffed. Dick was stubbornly looking forward. Nix sighed and ran a hand through his hair in defeat.

Suddenly, Dick stood up and walked down the aisle. He didn't look at Nix, but two and a half years of Army life had taught Nix when it was an appropriate time to follow. He counted to ten and walked out.

Outside, by the doors of the assembly hall, they could still hear the movie as clearly as if they were sitting inside.

“What is it, Nix?” Dick asked.

“What do you mean?” Nix replied. “I'm out of smokes.”

Dick looked flustered. “There’s a pack in my footlocker. You know the combination.” He half-turned, ready to walk back in.

“Dick—Wait a second, c'mon,” Nix grunted, reaching to touch his arm but thinking better of it at the last second.

“What?” Dick replied, eyeing Nix’s hand hanging in mid-air.

 _“Look,”_ came Cary Grant’s voice from the other side, _“what's a guy supposed to do? Put his heart on a plate before you'll trust him?”_

Nix hesitated. He tried to go for a smile, but he had a feeling that his face looked rather like someone had stepped on his toe. “You don’t need to keep me at arm’s length, you know.”

Dick’s expression softened a little. “I’m not trying to.”

“Funny, ‘cause that’s what it looks like from where I’m standing.”

Dick looked briefly at the stormy sky and shook his head. “I just thought a little distance would help.”

“Help who? Me? Because I never asked—”

“Me,” Dick interrupted him.

And this shut Nix right up, confusing him more than anything. For a moment he wondered if he had misunderstood, or misinterpreted their conversation from a few days back—but no, he knew he hadn’t. He’d been sober, for one.

“It’s not fair,” Nix said, trying not to sound petty, or whiny, and immediately feeling like he’d failed.

“I’m sorry.” Dick let out a long, weary sigh. “I’ve never done this before. The others weren’t—” He shook his head. “Nevermind.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” Nix replied with a tiny smirk. He deliberately ignored the mention to _the others_ , feeling like that line of conversation wouldn’t do them any good.

Dick smiled back, and though there wasn’t any joy to the smile, Nix thought it was a start.

Dick nodded in the direction of the tent area. “Want to go pick up those smokes?”

“Yes, please,” Nix groaned. “Can’t invade France without.”

“Nobody should,” Dick agreed, starting to walk.

“Says the non-smoker.”

“Yeah, well.” Dick kept his eyes peeled on the ground. “I’ve got other vices.”

And that careless line there and then could have poisoned the mood again, killing the tentative truce they’d reached, but Nix chose to ignore how shitty it made him feel and just kept walking, shrugging it off as one of the many things over which he had no power—like the weather, the positioning of the Nazi cannons on the other side of the Channel, and God’s inscrutable sense of humor.

“It’s all right,” he said lightly. “I forgive you.”

They walked in silence the rest of the way.

  
  


**_31 May 1944, Upottery (D-Day minus 6)_ **

 

On D-Day minus six, Lewis Nixon woke up at an ungodly hour to be able to report at battalion headquarters by zero-seven-hundred.

The base was already buzzing with life and excitement. Nix wasn’t one for easy enthusiasm when it came to moving one step closer to death, but he had to admit that a bit of euphoria had rubbed off even on his sardonic, godless self. It hadn’t taken much, really: he’d crossed Dick’s path on his way to breakfast and the fiery determination in his eyes had lingered at the back of Nix’s mind until he’d felt a hint of patriotic spirit—more likely, desire for adventure—stir in his heart. The day had much improved after that.

It was reassuring, seeing him like that. Dick had been looking subtly off for a few days. Nix suspected it had started on Sunday, when Nix had let himself be dragged to the Whitsun celebration at the local Methodist church. There had been a girl, a pretty three or four-year-old, and something about her had impressed Dick strongly. She was spirited and unruly in the charming way of the very young, unable to stay put, and terribly cute in her miniature clothes. Dick had smiled and laughed and even waved back when the little thing had waved at the congregation like they were all her friends.

By the time the celebration was over—and the little girl on her way home with her parents—Dick’s countenance had taken a melancholic turn.

They had sat outside for a while, on a bench by the cemetery adjacent to the church.

“How’s Mikey?” Dick had asked at some point.

“Mm? Great.”

Nix had taken the picture out of his wallet, even though it reminded him of Kathy and he didn’t want to think about her. But he liked thinking about Mikey, and he liked that picture. Dick had smiled.

“Blanche wrote that he said a word a few weeks ago, when she was visiting. They thought he’d said ‘daddy’, but then they found his teddy bear on the floor.”

“Do you miss him?”

“I do,” Nix had answered, truthfully, though sometimes when he felt a little grim he wasn't exactly sure what was there to miss. He loved Mikey, no doubt, but Mikey wasn’t old enough to love him in return. The times he’d gone home, before England, Nix had had the impression that his son perceived him as a random acquaintance, the last in a constellation of revolving adult figures who came and went without leaving much of a trace. Babies had limited memory, and he bet that toddlers weren’t that much better.

Dick had silently returned the photograph.

“You should get one of those,” Nix had said lightly. “After the war’s over. A little side project while you figure out your farm thing.”

“And a wife who _understands_?” Dick had replied, with a snappy edge to his voice that Nix hadn't been able to explain.

“Well, yeah, sure. I mean, you should have a family.”

“Yeah, you said,” Dick sighed, rubbing his face with both hands.

“Did I?” Nix had replied, confused.

“Long time ago. Nevermind. Shall we?”

The truth was, they hadn’t been truly at ease around each other since Easter. They hadn’t talked about it—really, what was there to say—and for the best part of three weeks they had avoided crossing each other’s path. The pressure had built and built with no hope for release, until one night in early May Nix had gone and cornered Dick on his way back to his billet, with a beautiful tactical move worthy of Dick Winters himself. The alley had been tiny, shady, and perfectly secluded from view. It smelled of Scotland, and Nix had been immediately overpowered by sensory memory and more than a hint of desperation. 

Dick had put up only a token resistance. His breathing was fast and broken and his mouth hellishly hot on Nix’s cold skin. He mumbled something against Nix’s throat, a single syllable that Nix didn’t quite catch but thought sounded like his name.

“What?”

“I thought—” Dick raised his head, and there was still enough light around to tell that he looked troubled. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“For _what_?” Nix asked, voice rising out of shock at the idea that Dick might be apologizing.

Dick’s hand had been resting on Nix’s arm. Now it gripped and gripped until it was uncomfortably tight. Dick swallowed hard, like he’d bit off a bigger mouthful than he could force down.

“Sometimes I just—want. Everything,” he said. A confession. Then he dipped his head back into Nix’s neck, leaving the words reverberating over and over in Nix’s throbbing temples.

For the first time in his life, in a damp little alley with his best friend's mouth latched on his pulse point like a vampire, Nix had come before he’d managed to get his cock out of his pants.

Nix wasn’t a fool, but he was starting to suspect that his judgement might be severely impaired when it came to Dick Winters, because he’d honestly thought that that was the end of it, that they were back to normal. Dick had looked much more like himself afterwards, and for a little while the weight had lifted from Nix's shoulders. Until Whitsun.

Now, three days after the celebration, the camp was a mess of people coming and going with shouted orders, and open trucks quickly filling with footlockers and supplies. Once the loading was over, the trucks lined up in the center of town and multiple teary farewells took place at the same time.

Mrs. Barnes was holding up pretty well, face dry and all, but Mr. Barnes’ cheeks glimmered with a hint of wetness when he shook Dick’s right hand in both of his. Nix looked away and hid his smile, not to embarrass the little man by openly witnessing his wavering upper lip. When he looked again, Mr. Barnes had taken a step back and Mrs. Barnes had both her hands up to Dick's cheeks. Dick bent forward to hug her, and Nix saw her whisper something into Dick’s ear. When Dick straightened his back, he stared at her for a long moment before nodding and letting her go.

In Upottery, at the base close to the airfield where they would do the final take-off, they were quartered in olive drab wall tents, two officers to a tent. Nix’s buddy was Clarence Hester—quite the perfect arrangement, since Clarence was scrupulously tidy and a friend and knew all about Nix’s late-night drinking, having joined in a good deal of that as early as ‘42, at Camp Toccoa. Dick, he assumed, would be quartered with Harry, his assistant platoon leader.

When Nix ventured to smoke Dick out, he found him with Meehan. Both bent over the camp table, heads close, voices hushed. Meehan was sitting on his foldable chair and Dick half-hovered over him, one hand resting on the CO’s backrest, the other on the table, where a map lay spread out with a compass, pencil, and a string. They were not really looking at it, though—more like at each other.

Nix had opened the flap without announcing himself, as was his unfortunate habit, and both heads snapped in his direction with slightly excessive energy. Did Nix imagine the guilty look on Dick's face, the mild embarrassment on Meehan’s?

“Sorry, I—” Nix made a gesture in Dick’s direction. “Was looking for you,” he finished lamely.

Dick threw a glance at the table, then back at Nix, and said something that explained the odd configuration, though Nix had no clue why Dick felt like explaining in the first place.

“So, it's Normandy.”

Nix nodded slowly. Meehan looked between the two of them, subtly puzzled, like he was watching a game he didn't know the rules of. Nix stared back, and for the first time realized how good-looking the other man was, in a stocky, quarterback-y kind of way. 

“Yeah. It is,” Nix confirmed, suddenly disturbed by the doubt that he might have interrupted something. “Well, I'll leave you to it.”

“Nix,” Dick's voice caught him when he already had a foot out of the tent. “Did you want something?”

And funny enough, for a moment Nix couldn't remember what it was. He was so used to sharing every little thing with Dick—a joke he'd heard, an episode he’d witnessed, tidbits of intel that he felt at ease divulging even though he shouldn’t—that sometimes he’d just go look for him even with nothing to offer, and let their closeness kickstart the conversation. Then he remembered: he’d meant to ask him about Wally Moore’s accident. Dick had been the one who’d told Salve Matheson, who in turn had told everyone at battalion.

“It can wait,” he said. “Tom,” he nodded at Meehan, and walked out into the evening.

There was a dry and sticky feeling at the back of his mouth. Nix washed it away with a tiny sip off his flask and resisted the urge to go find Harry, because his mind had developed an unhealthy association between his friend and night drinking, and for once he didn’t feel like drinking.

In the end he retired to his tent and resorted to reviewing his annotated Normandy maps for the twentieth time. He didn’t need to—honest to God, he had his bit committed to memory down to the smallest details—but it gave him something to do, and kept at bay a bad feeling he’d been harboring for a couple of days in the back of his mind. Hester came and went a few times and made fun of him once (“ _Planning your holidays, Nix? Any good restaurants this side of the DZ?”_ ), then disappeared again on official business, most likely an impromptu meeting with Strayer and Horton.

Shortly before lights-out Nix was still bent over the camp table, although he’d stopped doing anything useful for several minutes and his eyes now simply wandered aimlessly from Ste. Marie du Mont to Carentan, from Omaha to Utah. He heard someone walk in, but didn’t bother turning, certain that it was Hester.

“What was it? Bob Strayer’s missing the big jump to go see Laurence Olivier?”

“I hope not,” Dick’s voice replied, and Nix quickly turned to find him standing in front of the entrance. Nix grinned. He was not the only one who had lost the good habit of announcing himself, apparently.

Dick took a step forward, blatantly not looking at the map. “Is it a bad time?”

“No,” Nix answered, a sudden yawn making his jaw creak unpleasantly. “Just keeping busy, is all.”

“It’s hard to just sit and wait,” Dick agreed.

“Yeah.” He eyed Dick’s stiff posture and the awkward way he seemed to just loom in the middle of the tent, casting an elongated shadow on the tarp wall. “You can’t sleep?”

“Not yet. I thought maybe we could talk a little?”

“Be my guest.” Nix gestured at the cot, and Dick sat on it carefully, as if he didn’t want to make it creak too loudly. 

“So,” he said, but nothing followed.

Nix’s senses started to tingle at the other's odd behavior, but he waited. Dick rubbed his hands slowly, palm against palm, looking at a spot somewhere around Nix’s knee.

“I know that this isn’t a good time,” Dick started—quite a bad start. “With the jump so close and all. But if I don’t speak up now, we—I think we need clarity. _I_ need clarity.”

“God, this sounds serious,” Nix joked, and then closed his mouth when he realized that the joke hadn’t landed, and Dick wouldn’t look up. “Is it? Serious?”

Dick nodded slowly. “It is.”

“Out with it, then.”

More hand rubbing; Dick’s dry palms made a soft brushing noise. Dick adjusted his weight on the cot, eliciting a soft creak from the rusty springs, and finally met Nix’s worried eyes.

A thin layer of perspiration started to gather under Nix’s armpits. Dick's face was white and grey, shadows flickering under his eyes with the dancing light of the gas lamp. He looked like he was about to be sick on Nix’s boots.

“I think that we should end it,” Dick said, voice steady but curiously flat, like he’d rehearsed the line a few times.

Nix didn't know what his face showed at that; not surprise, surely, because he didn’t feel surprised in the least—which was in itself odd, as he had had no clue that this would happen before it did. Whatever it was, Dick’s face twitched in response, and he hastened to add: “I don’t mean our friendship. I—”

“I know what you mean,” Nix snapped.

Dick swallowed, and his eyes dropped to Nix’s boots before he forced them to move up again. “This is not working, Nix. It’s too big a distraction. I can’t. I need to focus on the men.”

“A-ha,” Nix said softly.

“I think it's best.” A pause, perhaps a studied one—Nix couldn't tell for sure. “For both of us.”

“Well, that's awfully nice of you,” Nix said scornfully.

Dick looked at his hands, apparently unable to sustain Nix's gaze for longer than a minute. “I know it's not fair to ask. But I would like us to go back to the way we were.”

 _When?_ , Nix wanted to ask, though he wouldn’t. _Before the troop ship? Before Mackall? Before Toccoa?_ If a distraction is what they were for each other, then he doubted that there had ever been a time when Dick hadn’t been one for him.

“I have it on good authority that it's not possible,” Nix said, reaching automatically for the flask on his table.

“Yeah,” Dick murmured. “I know. But I’d like for us to try.”

It hit Nix, distantly, that Dick was breaking up with him, and with that came the realization that all the while they had been, in fact, in a relationship. That there was no other possible name for what they had shared, and any other tag Nix had used in his mind had been just a vague attempt to resize its magnitude, diminish it, eventually brush it off without further scrutiny. He had been quite successful at it, too. Lewis Nixon, master of self-deception.

“Well,” he said at length, when the silence between them got unbearable. “Well,” he repeated, considering the flask in his hand, unsure not so much if he wanted to drink—he did—but rather if, once started, he would manage to stop.

“You’ll be fine,” Dick said, and that was precious, wasn't it, Dick outlying for him the full range of acceptable feelings. “We'll be fine,” Dick added, uselessly.

Nix kissed the mouth of the flask and tipped it with a flick of his wrist. The first gulp tasted good and shitty at the same time; the second, slightly better.

Dick watched him drink in the same way Nix imagined he regarded roadkill. Like he thought Nix pitiful, but in a position that was more or less inevitable.

“Is it about that time in Swindon?” Nix asked, putting the flask down on his thigh.

“No,” Dick answered, with a small hesitation.

“Is there someone else?”

“No,” Dick replied immediately.

“Liars don't go to Heaven, you know.”

“Neither do men like me,” Dick replied. “But I’ve never lied to you.”

Nix heard himself chuckle, his chapped lips pulled against their will into a broad smile. He took another swig from his flask. “Right.”

“I've never,” Dick repeated, looking a little pale. “Lew, you've got to believe this.”

“Is it Lew, now?”

“Can't I call you Lew?”

“You only call me Lew when you want to do it,” Nix observed.

Dick rubbed his face with his hand, a tired little gesture that made Nix want to close the distance between them and touch him. Then again, most things made him feel like that these days. He felt a pang of pain and then pure, blinding rage at the idea that he wouldn't be allowed to do it anymore.

“At least don't tell me it's another paratrooper,” Nix dropped viciously. “Please. I'd hate to think I'm just a type.”

“Nix, there’s nobody else,” Dick said firmly. “It's not like that.”

“What’s it like, then?”

“I told you. I can't be distracted. I need—”

“Bullshit,” Nix snapped. “That bit about focusing on the men? You go sell that saintly crap to someone else.”

The thin line of Dick's lips told Nix that the blow had landed, and he felt a rush of venomous glee at the idea of hurting him, even just a little.

“I don't know what else to say. I—”

“Try the fucking truth.”

Dick looked away. “The truth is I’m tired, Nix. I'm tired of this.”

Memories of Scotland rushed to Nix's mind; he had to take another sip to swallow them down.

It all made sense, really. Fumbling clothes-on in damp alleys, the occasional blowjob in a hotel room, always alert, always on guard, and the rare times they could have given each other something more Nix had chickened out, hadn’t he, too engrossed in his own fucked-up life to give a damn what Dick wanted. It was no wonder that Dick had called it quits. That was no way to live for a grown-up man. Frankly, it was a miracle that it had taken this long.

“Okay,” Nix said, screwing the cap of the hip flask back on.

Dick studied him warily. “Okay?”

“Yeah. It's fine.” He ran a hand through his hair, then let the arm fall limp over the armrest of his chair. He gestured vaguely at the table, where the map lay covered in grey pencil marks. “Now, if you don't mind.”

Dick stood up. “I'll leave you to it.”

Nix rested his elbows on the edge of the table and grabbed his pencil, twirling it idly in his fingers.

He didn't flinch when Dick's hand touched his shoulder, but it felt unexpected, and already a little unwarranted.

“I need to know. We're still friends, aren't we,” Dick asked without asking, more a hopeful statement than a question.

Nix didn't look up. “Yeah, of course.”

“All right. I'll see you tomorrow.” He gave Nix's shoulder a gentle squeeze and walked out of the tent, feet steady on the crunchy ground.

Hester came back sometime after Nix had gone out for a night walk, and was asleep long before Nix crawled back onto his own cot. If he wondered why all of Nix's stuff was on the floor, he probably attributed it to the Vat, or to Nix's general untidiness.

  
  


**_D-Day minus 1_ **

 

It was the real jump, this time. Nix looked up at the grey sky, trying to gauge if it looked any better than yesterday, if it was any less of a bad idea to jump today, and found that he honestly couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered much, because the decision had been made.

Before leaving battalion headquarters he’d asked Lieutenant Colonel Strayer if this was the real one. Strayer had frowned and looked at him like the question was idiotic: they had, after all, just announced to the whole battalion that they were going to jump tonight.

“Sir, what I mean is,” Nix had continued, “if the weather turns again, are they going to call it off?”

Strayer had smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile, nor a reassuring one. It was the smile of a man who had the luxury of not being the one who made the call.

“You go get your stuff ready, Lieutenant. You’re in my stick.”

Nix's hundred-and-twenty-five pounds of equipment now lay on a tarp on the ground, ready to be strapped to his body. Drowsy from the air sickness pills and tired of smoking, he crouched on his heels and tediously went through his stuff again, ticking each item off in his mind.

He caught sight of Dick three C-47’s down, clipboard in hand and a pencil in his mouth, intent on supervising his platoon’s operations. Not far from where Nix was standing, Clarence Hester was equally busy with the two headquarters company sticks.

There was no point in wondering, he knew. It was futile; childish, even; and everybody recommended avoiding it at all cost. But at some point after the announcement he had started to think about death.

He wasn't afraid; he could honestly say as much. He wasn't worried about Kathy and the kid either—they would never want for anything, with or without him. No, it wasn't that.

It was more like—What if either of them died, and the last words they’d said to one another were, what? _Pass me the salt?_

It had been just a fleeting thought at first, little more than a mental joke, but now the prospect pained him with an intensity he hadn't foreseen. And he knew that he couldn't expect to pack the perfect little moment ahead of each jump, each patrol, each operation that could send either of them to their maker. At some point they would have to make do with much, much less than _Pass me the salt_ , and maybe in the end it wouldn't even matter.

And yet. At some point Hester must have noticed that something was off, because he came and touched Nix's shoulder, mutely asking if he was all right. Nix nodded and, mostly to keep himself busy, went to the latrine to take one last piss.

Shortly before twenty-two-hundred came the order to get ready. Nix started harnessing up, carefully strapping and tucking item after item onto his body. Halfway through he stopped to help Hester with his leg bag, and when he pulled himself up from the ground, he caught Dick staring at him.

It was a strange look, not like Dick at all, too intense and held for too long. Nix felt like the other was trying to carve a hole in the middle of his face, and held his gaze in kind, out of curiosity and of some primal male instinct not to back down.

A rapid fire of memories shot through his mind. The tangy smell of sea and sweat. A stiletto knife polished to a mirror sheen. Tender flesh enveloping his fingers. The taste of semen and whiskey. His own voice warning softly: _I'm tired of this._

Dick looked away first, and Nix decided that he was in fact tired, so fucking tired of feeling the way he did, of being the kind of person he was, of this endless cycle of wondering and regretting, rinse and repeat.

If somebody asked him where he was going, he didn't hear. If he heard, he didn't care.

Dick noticed him when Nix was quite close already. He looked surprised, then vaguely alarmed, but when Nix said: “Dick, a word,” he just followed. A few steps away from the door of the C-47, barely any distance at all from 1st Platoon who were gathered round the plane like a gang of rebellious schoolboys, with the mohawks and the face paint. He and Dick were still in plain sight, but the howling wind provided a minor illusion of privacy.

Nix swallowed around something thick and tight in his throat, something that felt like fear but wasn’t. 

Without the helmet covering his fiery hair, Dick wouldn’t pass muster in a camouflage class. The dark smudges across his cheeks were a joke, as they only camouflaged his freckles, which Nix felt the Nazis would have little interest in.

“Look—” Nix’s hand reached up to Dick’s shoulder unopposed, and then tentatively hooked the back of Dick’s neck above the collar of his field jacket. “Be safe, okay?”

Dick’s mouth twitched with a hint of humor. “You know there’s a war on, Nix?”

“You know what I mean. Don’t you go round playing man of steel. You’re not bulletproof.”

The corners of Dick’s eyes crinkled ever-so-softly. Three fingers discreetly pinched Nix’s sleeve. “I won’t. And same to you.”

Their pose would soon look extravagant even to the casual observer, and though he was loathe to break it, Nix awkwardly patted the back of Dick’s neck and took a step back.

“In the plane in ten minutes! Come on, boys, hurry up!” came Harry’s shout from down the line.

Dick checked his watch. “I need to get ready,” he said mildly, and Nix nodded.

“I’ll meet you on the other side.”

“I’ll be behind the cannons,” Dick promised, already half-turning on his heels, but not so fast that Nix would miss the quick upward flicker of his mouth.

Nix started walking back to his plane, checking the sky as he did.

Maybe it would clear up, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boy, writing this second part has been quite a ride. I'm trying to make Nix grow bit by bit (more like one step forward and two backwards), I hope that the process reads realistic and not too hopelessly slow. (Look, look, we got to the end of episode 1! It took only 80k words :D)  
> The road is still long and rocky but I do see a chance of true happiness for the boys somewhere over the rainbow. Don't despair! And as ever, thanks for bearing with me till this point.
> 
> PS. The idea that Dick Winters might have incited the NCO mutiny comes from Don Malarkey's book _Easy Company Soldier_ , which I haven't read (I learned about the theory from [this](https://muccamukk.dreamwidth.org/1185543.html) post by Muccamukk, who has. Thanks for the ref!). Much like Harry in the fic, I'm not sure that Dick would've done something as morally grey as that, but Nix? C'mon.
> 
> PPS. If you want to see Cary Grant knitting, please proceed [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqexrsr1twc). The movie is the one running in the background when Guarnere finds out about his brother. The title is "Mr. Lucky".


End file.
